RMRC Lahowal 4th in country to isolate SARS-CoV-2 virus; finds globally dominant A2a stain in Assam

GUWAHATI: ICMR-Regional Medical Research Centre for NE Region at Lahowal in Dibrugarh district has successfully isolated Covid-19 virus that will help in developing inactivated vaccine and has also found that all strains circulating in Assam is the same "A2a clade (a grouping that includes a common ancestor and all the descendants)", which is dominant across the world including India.
“The A2a clade is now the most dominant clade across the world including India. In fact world over, the SARS-CoV-2 virus strains circulating differs by less than 0.3%. So, the strain variations till now in different geographical regions of the world should not pose a problem for vaccine development,” the lab said in a statement.
RMRC, Dibrugarh is only the third government lab in the country after NIV (ICMR Lab), Pune and CCMB (CSIR lab), Hyderabad and fourth lab overall after Bharat Biotech (Pvt Biotechnology lab at Hyderabad), to isolate the virus in tissue culture.
The scientists of RMRC, Dibrugarh, Dr Biswa Jyoti Borkakoti (Microbiology, Virology & Bioinformatics ) and Dr Aniruddha Jakharia (Biotechnology), have isolated the COVID-19 virus in VERO-CCL81 cell line derived from Kidney epithelial cell lines from green African monkey, which expresses the important ACE2 receptor needed by SARS-CoV-2 for cellular entry.
The Covid-19 virus which is just over six-months old has spread across all human communities and scientists now have detected over 10 different clades or strains circulating around the world. “Originally only two types of the virus were noted, the L-type and the S-type but the S-type is slowly disappearing. It was found that all strains circulating in Assam were L-type. However, now scientists have classified the virus into different clades (O, A1, A2a, A3, B, B1, and so on) which differ from one another very minutely,” the statement said.
"In layman’s term the significance of the COVID-19 virus isolation by the team of scientists from RMRC, Dibrugarh, is that live and viable SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19 virus) can now be produced in the laboratory in abundance and as and when required. This is important for development of inactivated Covid-19 vaccine where virus grown in laboratory are inactivated by heat or chemical and purified for use as vaccines after pre-clinical and clinical trials," the lab stated.
The lab has been supporting the state of Assam and other NE states in the fight against COVID-19 and now the centre has provided almost 50,000 diagnostic test reports of Covid-19 for the people of this region. The research centre is engaged in various biomedical research work including, on the new COVID-19 pandemic.
“Further apart from vaccine development, the potential uses of cultures of SARS-CoV-2 includes drug screening for potential drugs or drug candidates against the virus, testing effectiveness of disinfectants, use in development of therapeutic antibodies etc,” the statement added.
Bharat Biotech (a company based in Hyderabad) in collaboration with ICMR-NIV Pune (which supplied the virus grown in tissue culture), has developed an inactivated COVID-19 vaccine (COVAXIN) which will go for Phase I and Phase II human clinical trials starting in July.