The Indian Express : Mar 29, 2020, 02:09 PM
HYDERABAD: A faculty member of the Department of Biochemistry at University of Hyderabad (UoH) has designed potential vaccine candidates to prevent Covid-19 using computational tools. These can be tested further for their effectiveness.The potential vaccine candidates called T cell epitopes are aimed at working against all the structural and non-structural proteins of the novel Coronavirus.They are tiny coronaviral peptide molecules that are used by cells to trigger an immune response and destroy cells harbouring the peptides. Using powerful immunoinformatics approaches with computational software, the faculty member, Dr Seema Mishra, designed these potential epitopes in a way that they pose no cross-reactivity to human cells and can be used to vaccinate an entire population.A ranked list of the potential vaccine candidates, based on how effectively they would be used by human cells to stop the virus, has also been generated. These vaccine candidates have to be investigated experimentally in order to provide conclusive evidence.