Computational approaches in COVID-19 vaccine development

The deadly outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) that began in Wuhan city of China, late in 2019, has caused thousands of causalities globally, where the infected subjects show severe respiratory illness, fever, and pneumonia-like symptoms. The efforts to design a safe, cost-effective, and most importantly efficient coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine have been fruitful so far, and approximately 10 vaccines have been approved by the World Health Organization and many more in trials. However, this virus possesses the exceptional ability to rapidly mutate and spread at an exponential level. Research and development activities around the world, directed at vaccine development, were accelerated after the SARS-CoV-2 gene sequence was made publicly available. The economic and humanitarian pressure of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is necessitating evaluation of alternative vaccine production platforms and the use of innovative paradigms to speed up the development. Hence, more determination is required to develop vaccines that have higher efficacy and specificity. Some of the regimes being followed are discussed in this chapter along with the current developments.