Indigenous corona vaccine covaccine was made with the help of monkeys

New Delhi. India’s indigenous corona vaccine Covaccine has been approved by many countries of the world. But do you know that rhesus macaque monkeys played an important role in the trial of the vaccine. This has been mentioned in the book ‘Going Viral: Making of Covaxin the Inside Story’. In the book, Dr. Balram Bhargava, Director General of the Indian Council of Medical Research, has mentioned some such things about the making, trial and approval of India’s indigenous vaccine, which no one knows about.

In this book, the Director General of ICMR has revealed the challenges of Indian scientists against the Kovid-19 epidemic, development of a strong laboratory network to manufacture vaccines, new technologies ranging from diagnosis, treatment and serosurvey along with many important things. . Dr. Bhargava says that it is important to remember that the heroes of the success story of the vaccine are not just humans, as 20 monkeys have contributed to it, thanks to which millions of us now have a life-saving vaccine. The book further states that when we reached this stage where we knew that the vaccine could produce antibodies in small animals, the next step was to test it on larger animals like monkeys. Whose body structure and immune system are similar to those of humans. Used in medical research around the world, rhesus macaque monkeys are considered the best for this kind of research.

Elaborating further on the story of the development of the vaccine, Dr. Bhargava said, ICMR-National Institute of Virology’s Level 4 laboratory, which is the only state-of-the-art facility in India for primate studies. It once again accepted the challenge of doing this important research. After this the biggest hurdle was that from where to get the rhesus macaque monkeys because India does not have rhesus macaques bred by laboratories? For this, researchers from the National Institute of Virology contacted many zoos and institutions across India. For this, young monkeys were needed whose body had good antibodies.

For the trial of the vaccine, a team of ICMR-NIV visited some areas of Maharashtra to identify and catch monkeys. He told that due to the lockdown, food crisis had arisen in front of these monkeys, due to which they had gone to the dense forest. After this, to help the scientists, the Forest Department of Maharashtra scanned square kilometers of forests and tracked the monkeys in Nagpur.