More on Covid-19

NEW DELHI: India has become the fifth country to successfully isolate a strain of the novel coronavirus. China, Japan, Thailand and the US did it before.Simply put, it means that scientists have been able to obtain a pure sample of the virus that has been contained outside the human body.The scientific success is important because it will help in developing drugs, vaccines and rapid diagnostic test kits, the director general of Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), Dr Balram Bhargava, said.He added that the isolation of the novel coronavirus, the agent responsible for the ongoing outbreak of Covid-19, wasn't easy as India had fewer positive cases when they started the project."Total 21 throat swab and nasal swab samples were examined for this purpose. Of that, 11 tested positive and eight strains could be isolated from among them. They are 99.98% identical with the strain of the virus that led to outbreaks in Wuhan in China," said Dr R R Gangakhedkar, chief epidemiologist at ICMR. He added that now scientists can test whether a drug will work against the virus or not to develop rapid diagnostic kits.The isolation of this virus will also help in understanding the biology and evolution of the novel coronavirus, say ICMR experts. Till date, there is no cure for Covid-19. Also, there is no preventive vaccination.Anti-HIV drugs lopinavir and ritonavir have been tried on some Covid-19 patients, including the Italian national admitted at Sawai Man Singh hospital in Jaipur, with promising results. But the scientists said it is too early to conclude the efficacy.Most patients are only receiving symptomatic treatment, they added.Recently, in a draft report made public by the World Health Organisation (WHO), the experts claimed that Remdesivir, a drug developed for use against ebola, which caused major outbreaks in remote villages in Central Africa in 2014, is most promising for treating Covid-19.This is because the in-vitro (tests performed in test tube) and in-vivo (tests performed in living organism) data for the drug is available for coronaviruses. "Further, studies in mice using Remdesivir showed superior efficacy over Kaletra+IFNbeta," the draft report said.The report added that a clinical trial is being planned in China to evaluate the safety and efficacy of the drug in association with optimised standard of care, as the next step. Remdesivir slows the infection of healthy cells by blocking viral replication.The WHO expert also reviewed drugs used in HIV treatment - lopinavir and ritonavir - either alone or in combination with IFNbeta. It stated that among the repurposed drugs under consideration, this would be the suitable second option for rapid implementation in clinical trials.The use of convalescent sera-serum obtained from someone who has recovered from an infectious disease and considered to be especially rich in antibodies against the infectious agent of the disease could also be an option, said the expert group. However, the report added: "...but it remains to be defined if sufficient amounts of sera with high antibodies titres could be feasibly collected, using concentration and purification processes."