Kovid-19: Hyderabad-based CSIR-CCMB announces possible mRNA vaccine

The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research-Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CSIR-CCMB) in Hyderabad has announced a potential mRNA vaccine candidate against SARS-CoV-2. The center leads India’s mRNA vaccine technology, which has been developed domestically and without the contribution of any external technology.

The team from CCMB’s Atal Incubation Center led the development of the vaccine candidate. Rajesh Iyer, the scientist of the project Indian Express That they observed a strong immune response against the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in rats after two doses of mRNA. The resulting anti-spike antibodies were more than 90% effective in preventing the ACE2 receptor from being bound to the coronavirus in humans.

The mRNA vaccine candidate is currently studying pre-clinical challenges to its effectiveness in protecting against live viral infections.

Dr. Madhusudhan Rao, CEO of Incubation Lab and Chief Scientist of Research Indian Express The war with Covid-19 has illuminated a number of vaccine technologies and India’s vaccine program has been highly praised. However, India lacked a powerful mRNA vaccine technology, developed by Pfizer-BioNtech or Moderna to fight the virus in the United States and Europe. The technology developed at CSIR-CCMB is based on self-replicating RNA, different from the mRNA vaccine developed from Genoa Bio, he said.

The CSIR-CCMB team has developed mRNA vaccine technology and developed a home-made vaccine candidate against the virus in less than a year since the project began, Dr. Rao said.

Despite the threat of virus reduction, the vaccine platform promises a number of infectious diseases that India continues to face.

CCMB Director Dr Binoy Nandikuri said the development was a proof-of-principle policy where the team demonstrated that mRNA vaccine technology could be replicated from end to end. The beauty of the technology is its modularity and rapid change, which means significantly less effort to create vaccines for other infectious diseases such as malaria, dengue and tuberculosis.

Dr Nadikuri added that CSIR, India’s largest research and development organization under the Union Ministry of Science and Technology, has taken a far-sighted initiative to build capacity in modern health technologies as part of its self-reliance program. He added that mRNA vaccines were among today’s top technologies and demonstrated their strength during the global epidemic.

Vaccines work by training the immune system to identify pathogenic microorganisms and quickly eliminate them if they are later exposed. mRNA vaccine technology accomplishes this by introducing an mRNA into the micro-organism. This mRNA, introduced into the host cell, gives rise to a microbial protein, or part of it, which trains the immune system to prevent a real infection with a living microorganism.