Coronavirus : How long will it take to develop a COVID-19 Vaccine
By Lokmat English Desk | Published: May 8, 2020 02:24 PM2020-05-08T14:24:06+5:302020-05-08T14:24:06+5:30
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The spread of coronavirus is increasing day by day all over the world. Scientists around the world are trying to find a vaccine to fight against the coronavirus. No drugs or vaccines have been found on the virus so far.
Tests show if the virus is alive in the body. According to Professor Iwaski, up to 30 percent of people do not produce the antibodies needed to fight the coronavirus.
Antibodies are Y-shaped proteins produced as part of the body's immune response to infection. They help eliminate disease-causing microbes from the body, for instance by directly destroying them or by blocking them from infecting cells.
But scientists are skeptical of how the body will respond after contracting the viruses. According to experts, the immune system of a person fights defends itself from viruses and other invaders.
A huge array of cells and chemicals your body produces work in concert to clear a foreign invader from your body. “There’s a lot of elegance to this whole system,” Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at the Yale School of Medicine, says. “It’s like an orchestra.” All these cells and chemicals have to work in concert — each with a different part to play — to defeat the virus.
It takes time to get rid of the disease after the first virus infection. But after re-infection, the person's body is ready to fight the virus. Because antibodies are made. But that is not the case with the coronavirus.
Even if people do become immune, “one thing we don’t know about still is how long that immunity would last,” Rasmussen says. “And that’s unfortunately not something we can determine until we wait months or years in the future, and test again and see if those antibodies are still there.”
Thirty percent of people who recovered from the disease in China have been found to have antibodies. This means that these people are cured without developing antibody proteins that fight the virus.
Plasma Therapy involves transfusion of plasma from a convalescent coronavirus patient to a critical patient. The blood of a convalescent patient is rich in antibodies that are expected to help the critical patient recover.
