US/Indian collaboration on vaccine against COVID-19

US clinical-stage synthetic biology company Codagenix has entered into a collaboration with the Serum Institute of India to rapidly co-develop a live-attenuated vaccine against the emergent coronavirus.

There are no licensed vaccines or therapeutics for this novel coronavirus, now referred to as COVID-19. A live-attenuated vaccine has multiple advantages, including mounting an immune response to multiple antigens of the virus and the ability to scale for mass production.

Codagenix uses viral deoptimization to synthesize "rationally designed," live-attenuated vaccines. Thanks to major advances in the speed and quality of genome sequencing in recent years, in addition to open-source data sharing among scientists and public health agencies around the world, the nCoV genome was available to the public in a matter of days after the virus was first isolated. Codagenix has already designed multiple nCoV vaccine candidate genomes using its proprietary deoptimization technology. The vaccine viruses will then be grown and tested in vivo by contracted laboratories suitable for containment, prior to testing in clinical trials.