As the race for a COVID-19 vaccine intensifies, a professor of Immunology, Ganiyu Arinola, says Nigerian universities and research institutes have the capacity to develop a coronavirus vaccine.
Arinola, a staff of the Department of Immunology, University of Ibadan, said this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Sunday in Ibadan against the backdrop of the 2020 World Immunisation Week.
NAN reports that the World Immunisation Week celebrated worldwide in the last week of April is aimed at promoting the use of vaccines to protect people of all ages against diseases.
The don said that Nigerian researchers and scientists could develop viable vaccines against the virus with governmental support and political will.
“COVID-19 is spreading rapidly throughout the world. Due to lack of drugs to treat it, the option of vaccines to prevent it is still on.
” This is an important and responsible decision.
“There are many groups working on potential vaccines for COVID-19 using viral proteins and modified virus.
” Host proteins such as serum of infected persons containing anti-coronavirus antibodies can be used as passive immunisation but this is usually short-lived.
“COVID-19 vaccine like any other vaccine must be safe, widely used, elicit enough protective immune response and must have passed through the development and testing such as exploratory stage, pre-clinical stage, clinical development, regulatory review and approval, manufacturing and quality control. This takes a lot of time.
“Nigeria has capacities in universities and research institutes to develop vaccines but with government support and political will.
“There are capacities to isolate the virus, kill or attenuate the virus, sequence the virus genes, develop an antibody against the viral proteins and separate specific antibodies from immunised serum among other capacities,” he said.
The immunologist also warned against the use of traditional herbal medicines being touted as coronavirus vaccines or cure.
He said that while these herbal remedies might clear the symptoms of COVID-19, it would not kill already established coronavirus in the body.
According to him, many of the herbal medicines only have anecdotal evidence based on studies carried out on different animals which are genetically different from humans.
“The credibility of ethnomedicine in fighting epidemics in the past is appreciated in biomedicine.
“Herbal and plant-based remedies “may” have the edge over pharmaceuticals due to their easy and cheap availability, complex and synergistic nature of components.
“However, these herbs or plants are mentioned to have immune-boosting, antioxidant- and anti-inflammatory properties but the side effects are not discussed.
“Viral diseases like COVID-19 can be difficult to cure and antiviral drugs are difficult to develop because Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SAR-CoV 2) lives inside the host’s cell using host genetic machinery where they are protected from drugs and can mutate easily because it is an RNA virus.
“Moreover, COVID-19 is a new viral disease, there is need for enough direct evidence to support cures of these traditional remedies.
“The safety and direct effects of these herbs or plants on SARS-CoV 2 have to be assessed widely and the data from trials be published in peer-reviewed journals including other internationally accepted procedures,” he said.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), there are over 70 COVID-19 vaccines under development.
The global health body has, however, advised against the use of traditional herbal remedies for COVID-19, saying that “though some of them alleviate some of the milder symptoms of COVID-19, they do not kill the virus directly.”
NAN also reports that there had been calls for the inclusion of African scientists in the search for a COVID-19 vaccine.
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