Журнал молекулярной фармацевтики и исследований органических процессов

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Academic Prespective on the Urgent COVID-19 Vaccine Research, Development and Delivery.

Reza Nassiri

Vaccine researchers and developers worldwide are intensely working toward a common global health goal to develop a safe and effective vaccine(s) protecting the global population fromSARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19; the WHO nomenclature).  An ideal vaccine profile must proveto be both effective and safe when administered in the general population.  To date, there arefew vaccine candidates that show optimistic grounds for clinical trials, and thus, the promise of a vaccine is on the horizon (https://clinicaltrials.gov). There is an accelerated effort worldwide to deliver such a promise, a global marathon to also gain the market share of vaccine delivery. The nucleic acid vaccines such as DNA or mRNA vaccines are new-generation gene vaccines.  Selection of a specific target as an antigenic determinant in the molecular structure of SARS-CoV-2 is the most important step in vaccine research and design. It can be packaged as a recombinant protein eliciting neutralizing antibody production. Accordingly, the precise conformation of the protein is consequential in humoral immune responses in which the spike protein plays a central role.

 This viral receptor binds to the host cells at least 10 times as tightly as has been reported for COVID-19.  Precise mapping of this protein is a critical step toward vaccine discovery because the spike protein is one essential element of the virus that the immune system can potentially identify as non-self.  Once the introduction of this step is established to the immune cells, such cells are likely to trigger an immune response and subsequent production of antibodies.