Innovations and development of Covid-19 vaccines: A patent review.

More than 125 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 have been reported globally with rising cases in all countries since the first case was reported. A vaccine is the best measure for the effective prevention and control of COVID-19. There are more than 292 COVID-19 candidates' vaccines being developed as of July 2021 of which 184 are in human preclinical trials. A patent provides protection and a marketing monopoly to the inventor of an invention for a specified period. Therefore, vaccine developers, including Moderna, BioNTech, Janssen, Inovio, and Gamaleya also filed patent applications for the protection of their vaccines. This review aims to provide an insight into the patent literature of COVID-19 vaccines. The patent search was done using Patentscope and Espacenet databases. The results have revealed that most of the key players have patented their inventive COVID-19 vaccine. Many patent applications related to COVID-19 vaccines developed via different technologies (DNA, RNA, virus, bacteria, and protein subunit) have also been filed. The publication of a normal patent application takes place after 18 months of its filing. Therefore, many patents/patent applications related to the COVID-19 vaccine developed through different technology may come into the public domain in the coming days.

Bioinformatics analysis of rhinovirus capsid proteins VP1-4 sequences for cross-serotype vaccine development.

BACKGROUND: Rhinoviruses (RV) are associated with the development and exacerbations of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. They've also been linked to more severe diseases like pneumonia, acute bronchiolitis, croup, and otitis media. Because of the hypervariable sequences in the same serotypes, no effective vaccine against rhinoviruses has been developed to date. With the availability of new full-length genome sequences for all RV-A and RV-B serotyped strains, this study used bioinformatics to find a suitable RV strain with the highest similarity matrices to the other strains. METHODS: The full genomic sequences of all known different RV-A and -B prototypes were downloaded from the National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and divided into minor low-density lipoprotein receptor (LDLR) and major intercellular adhesion molecule groups (ICAM). The sequences were edited using Biological Sequence Alignment Editor, v 7.2.0 (BioEdit software) to study each capsid protein (VP1, VP2, VP3, and VP4) and analyzed using the EMBL-EBI ClustalW server and the more current Clustal Omega tool for the calculation of the identities and similarities. RESULTS: We analyzed and predicted immunogenic motifs from capsid proteins that are conserved across distinct RV serotypes using a bioinformatics technique. The amino acid sequences of VP3 were found to be the most varied, while VP4 was the most conserved protein among all RV-A and RV-B strains. Among all strains studied, RV-74 demonstrated the highest degree of homology to other strains and could be a potential genetic source for recombinant protein production. Nine highly conserved regions with a minimum length of 9-mers were identified, which could serve as potential immune targets against rhinoviruses. CONCLUSION: Therefore, bioinformatics analysis conducted in the current study has paved the way for the selection of immunogenic targets. Bioinformatically, the ideal strain's capsid protein is suggested to contain the most common RVs immunogenic sites.