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HGCO19: mRNA Vaccine Candidate
Read more on - Polity | Economy | Schemes | S&T | Environment
- What it is: India's mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccine candidate - HGCO19 - has received additional government funding for its clinical studies. This funding has been awarded under the 'Mission Covid Suraksha’.
- Points to note:
- HGCO19 - The novel mRNA vaccine candidate HGCO19 has been developed by Pune-based biotechnology company Gennova Biopharmaceuticals Ltd. in collaboration with HDT Biotech Corporation, USA. It has demonstrated safety, immunogenicity, neutralization antibody activity in the rodent and non-human primate models. Gennova has initiated the enrolment of volunteers for Phase 1/2 clinical trials for its vaccine candidate HGCO19.
- mRNA Vaccine vs Traditional vaccines - Vaccines work by training the body to recognise and respond to the proteins produced by disease-causing organisms, such as a virus or bacteria. Traditional vaccines are made up of small or inactivated doses of the whole disease-causing organism, or the proteins that it produces, which are introduced into the body to provoke the immune system into mounting a response. But the mRNA vaccines trick the body into producing some of the viral proteins itself. They work by using mRNA, or messenger RNA, which is the molecule that essentially puts DNA instructions into action. Inside a cell, mRNA is used as a template to build a protein.
- How mRNA vaccines work: To produce a mRNA vaccine, scientists produce a synthetic version of the mRNA that a virus uses to build its infectious proteins. This mRNA is delivered into the human body, whose cells read it as instructions to build that viral protein, and therefore create some of the virus’s molecules themselves. These proteins are solitary, so they do not assemble to form a virus. The immune system then detects these viral proteins and starts to produce a defensive response to them.
- Advantages of Using mRNA based vaccines: The mRNA vaccines are considered safe as mRNA is non-infectious, non-integrating in nature, and degraded by standard cellular mechanisms. They are highly efficacious because of their inherent capability of being translatable into the protein structure inside the cell cytoplasm. The mRNA vaccines are fully synthetic and do not require a host for growth, e.g., eggs or bacteria. Therefore, they can be quickly manufactured inexpensively to ensure their "availability" and "accessibility" for mass vaccination on a sustainable basis.
- Mission Covid Suraksha: It is India’s targeted effort to enable the development of indigenous, affordable and accessible vaccines for the country. The Centre had announced this package during the third economic stimulus. The Mission with its end-to-end focus from preclinical development through clinical development and manufacturing and regulatory facilitation for deployment consolidate all available and funded resources towards accelerated product development. It is led by the Department of Biotechnology and implemented by a dedicated Mission Implementation Unit at Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC).
- BIRAC: The Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) is a not-for-profit Section 8, Schedule B, Public Sector Enterprise. It has been set up by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) as an Interface Agency to strengthen and empower the emerging Biotech enterprise to undertake strategic research and innovation, addressing nationally relevant product development needs.
- Knowledge centre:
- Viruses - A virus is a submicroscopic infectious agent that multiples only inside the living cells of an organism (unlike bacteris). Viruses can infect all life forms - animals, plants, microorganisms, bacteria and archaea. Both viruses and bacteria share a common ancestor – a fully functioning, self-replicating cell that lived around 3.4 billion years ago, shortly after life first emerged on the planet. From this cell, bacteria have evolved in the direction of increasing complexity, while viruses have gradually shed genes they found they didn’t need – until they could no longer even reproduce on their own. A key step in the virus evolutionary journey came about around 1.5 billion years ago, when 66 virus-specific protein folds came on the scene. These changes are to proteins in the virus’ outer coat – the machinery viruses use to break into host cells. Today’s bacteria and viruses have many proteins in common. Most viruses have either RNA or DNA as their genetic material. The nucleic acid may be single- or double-stranded. The entire infectious virus particle, called a virion, consists of the nucleic acid and an outer shell of protein. The simplest viruses contain only enough RNA or DNA to encode four proteins. An estimated 10 nonillion (10 to the 31st power) individual viruses exist on our planet—enough to assign one to every star in the universe 100 million times over.
- Spike proteins - The Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) behind the worldwide outbreak of COVID-19 disease has a key biological characteristics of- the presence of spike proteins that allow these viruses to penetrate host cells and cause infection. The coronavirus spike protein is a class I fusion protein. Their spike proteins work a bit like shape-shifting lock picks. They can change shape to interact with a protein on the surface of human cells. The spike protein (S protein) is a large type I transmembrane protein ranging from 1,160 amino acids for avian infectious bronchitis virus (IBV) and up to 1,400 amino acids for feline coronavirus. A notable distinction between the spike proteins of different coronaviruses is whether it is cleaved or not during assembly and exocytosis of virions.
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