India (Commonwealth Union) – The race for an effective and safe COVID-19 vaccine continues with COVID-19 being the key focus in the last two years, with more information on the nature of the virus coming to light.
Researchers across the world have been looking into a variety of treatment options such as the impact of nutrition on the immune system that could better equip individuals to avoid severe disease and mortality for both the recent pandemic and possible future pandemics. New treatment options are also being explored by researchers such as an inhaled vaccine and new anti-viral treatments.
With a large number of infections being reported among those who had received a COVID jab, scientists at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi are researching virus-like particles (VLPs). The enhancement of a vaccine requires the use of a live virus for research, which can put the researchers at heavy risk and specialized laboratories with heavy restrictions that could limit the potential of the research. To overcome these obstacles researchers at IIT Delhi are making use of VLPs to take away this threat.
VLPs are nanoparticles consisting of assembled viral proteins that do not contain the infectious component. The components can be used as vaccine themselves, where two of them are currently being used against the human papillomavirus.
Researchers at IIT Delhi have partnered with the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute (THSTI) and created a SARS-CoV-2 Virus-Like Particles (VLPs), which is a potential vaccine. The VLPs deceived the immune system to initiate a counterattack in mice, the same way it would do so against SARS-CoV-2. “Animal experiments carried out at THSTI indicate that our VLPs trigger a strong adaptive immune response against multiple antigens. Vaccines based on inactivated virus naturally have this advantage. However, VLPs are safer as they are non-infectious due to lack of genome,”said Dr. Manidipa Banerjee, Professor of IIT Delhi who led the research.
