New Delhi:
An anti-Coronavirus vaccine being developed by the Pune-based company, Gennova, has become the first indigenous mRNA candidate to have received approval to initiate human clinical trial, a central government statement has said.
The mRNA vaccines are different than the conventional model. “The mRNA vaccines do not use the conventional model to produce immune response. Instead, mRNA vaccine carries the molecular instructions to make the protein in the body through a synthetic RNA of the virus,” the government said in the statement.
The mRNA vaccines are considered safe as they are “non-infectious, non-integrating in nature, and degraded by standard cellular mechanisms”.
The vaccines developed by American companies Pfizer and Moderna, which are said to have over 90 percent efficacy, use the mRNA model.
The AstraZeneca-Oxford’s Covishield vaccine, which has shown an efficacy of 70 percent and is being manufactured by the Serum Institute of India, uses the 50-year-old ‘adenovirus vector-based antigen’ platform.
