While Covid-19 continues to play havoc in the country, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Indore is have already started preparing a vaccine for the deadly virus and protective gears for personnel who are on the frontline of the COVID combat. Now, IIT Indore has prepared vaccine for Covid-19 and has also started testing it on animals. "Clinical trials of the vaccine have been started at National Centre for Cell Science (NCCS), Pune," said IIT Indore officiating director Neelesh Kumar Jain. The vaccine was prepared in August and trials on animals had also been started in the same month but the disclosure about it was made by the institute during the 8th convocation on Sunday.
On the sidelines of convocation, Jain shared the success achieved on the vaccine front and hoped that its production will reach its final stage in the coming few months. A team of scientists of IIT Indore led by Dr Debasis Nayak and some other agencies including NCCS were involved in the vaccine development. To develop a vaccine safe for humans, IIT Indore and NCCS jointly prepared a pseudovirus. In all practical sense, pseudoviruses structurally and immunologically resemble parent viruses, but lack the required genes to cause the disease.
In this work, the Vesicular Stomatitis Virus (VSV) backbone is used to create pseudotypes with SARSCoV-2 Spike proteins. The VSV is a mild animal virus, which never causes disease in humans. Basically, these pseudotypes will have spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, but the genetic material will be of VSV. After developing it, IIT Indore sent pseudovirus to other research partners for quality testing. Later vaccine was made to develop antibodies against the virus. As per protocols, the testing of virus is going on different animals. It will later be tested on humans. After it is found safe for humans, the government and other agencies would manufacture and distribute the vaccine.
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