COVID-19 and its Vaccine Development

By Aneshra Nabeel

Credit Gettyimages/iStockphoto-1208953647

An effective vaccine development for COVID-19 has become a top biomedical priority. There are currently no specific treatments or vaccines available due to the novelty of the virus. Hence rapid development of an effective vaccine against SARC-COV-2 is needed. Scientists are working hard for the development of an effective vaccine.

In this article we will see why will it take so long to develop a vaccine? And How long will it take to develop one? Then we’ll discuss the mutation ability of the virus and what does it mean for a vaccine. Before going to the depth that, what hinders in COVID-19 vaccine development. First, we need to know that what is COVID-19? Let’s see all of these questions one by one.

What is COVID-19?

COVID-19 is a disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 that can trigger a respiratory tract infection. It was first identified as an outbreak of respiratory illness Wuhan, China in December 2019. It can affect your upper respiratory tract and spread by person to person by contact.

COVID-19 bind to the angiotensin-converting enzyme-2 receptor on the membrane host cell to enable it to infect the host cell upon coupled with a reliance of serine protease TMPRSS2. This intracellular protein seems to be a determinant of the virus ability to infect the cell,

Why delay in vaccine development

It takes almost 10 to 15 years to develop a vaccine and fastest vaccine developed till date is for mumps which took 4 years.

Vaccine developers of COVID-19 are targeting to develop vaccine within a year or 18 months, if this happens it would be extra-ordinary. Now the question arises why don’t we speed it up?

Answer to that is because it is an overly complex process.

For a vaccine to enter the market, requires completing three crucial phases.

Phase-I is the safety of the vaccine.   
Phase-II is the effectiveness of the vaccine.  
Phase-III is the regulation of the vaccine

And time is needed to develop, test and license vaccine. That’s why we cannot speed up the process. Moreover, we want an effective vaccine to enter the market. Going too fast could lead to a non-effective vaccine or can cause health issues.

Mutated COVID-19

SARS-COV-2 is a beta coronavirus and has some other strains like MERS-COV and SARS-COV. Study reveals that it is derived from BAT-SARS-LIKE-CORONAVIRUS after mutation.          

When COVID-19 genome was compared with BAT-SARS-LIKE-CORONAVIRUS genome after selection of data from NCBI and results shows 92% similarity conforming close phylogenetic relationship and also indicating that it mutates.

When COVID-19 genome is compared with the genome of other related coronavirus family members by local alignment. The COVID-19 (GenBankMT188341.1) and COVID-19 (MT066175.1), showed 89% similarity with bat-SL-CoVZC45 and 82% SARS-CoV BJ182b respectively. Now questions are at what speed will it mutate? shall mutations make it more harmful? Is this mutating ability a threat for vaccine development?

Figure2, Screenshot of blast of two genomes, SARS-COV-2 and BAT-LIKE-SARS-CORONAVIRUS

Figure 3, https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S2052297520300251-gr1.jpg

Mutations in COVID-19 and its Vaccine development

COVID-19 is an RNA-based virus and like most viruses it mutates. RNA viruses are more likely to mutate as compared to DNA viruses. Dr Benjamin Neuman, the head of the biology department at Texas A&M University- Texarkana, said, “Nearly all mutations will make some part of the virus works less well than before”. Characteristics and Traits of the original version of COVID-19 (in Wuhan, China) is not different from that in Italy or New York.

Vaccine will most likely work against this mutant virus, in fact, slow and moderate nature of mutations is good news for the vaccine. Vaccine generally targets the previous version of the virus, but the virus has not mutated enough to escape the vaccine. Hopefully, when we finally have an effective vaccine it will protect people against the vast majority of these COVID-19 strains.

Mutations: a helping tool for scientists

Scientists from Arizona State University find out after comparison of sequences of COVID-19 that this virus had a unique mutation that involves deletion of 81 letters from its genome. They believe that this affected part of genetic code that produces a protein and this protein is key helping SARS-CoV-2 evade human defences, allowing it to replicate quickly.

So, mutations in the virus may help scientists to better understand how this virus is making people ill. It may help to develop an antiviral still effective vaccine comes.

Conclusion: There are a lot of hurdles in vaccine making of COVID-19. It is a novel disease and it requires further research before its vaccine development otherwise vaccine would be a failure. To have an effective vaccine we need more time and experiments, trails about safety, effectiveness and side effects. Scientists need to understand it completely before taking any further steps. We must be careful till an effective vaccine is not developed.

Authors information:

Aneshra Nabeel, BS. Biotechnology has written this review article.

References:

All the data used in this review article is available publicly. And all the resources used are given in this section.

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