Scientists are scrambling to develop a vaccine against coronavirus 2019-nCoV and plan to use advanced bioprocessing methods and techniques to accelerate production.

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At present there is no vaccine against the coronavirus However, various groups have started working on them, including Johnson & Johnson (J&J).

Sarah Smith, senior manager, communications & public affairs, EMEA at J&J’s Janssen unit, tells GEN that, “We began working on a vaccine two weeks ago, when the viral sequence became publicly available, and are hopeful that we can create a candidate vaccine for this virus and can start a Phase I clinical study within approximately 8–12 months. If necessary, we will work to scale up production of a suitable vaccine candidate in parallel. While it is possible that the virus could disappear relatively fast, we started the work quickly because we want to be prepared.”

Development and production will leverage Janssen’s AdVac vector technology and PER.C6 manufacturing platform, which were previously used to make an investigational Ebola vaccine, currently deployed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda. According to Smith, “We will use single-use technology in order to produce larger quantities of the vaccine on a flexible schedule at a later moment in time.” She also says that most manufacturing would be carried out in house, adding that “for fill/finish activities, we will utilize external CMOs.”

The fossilized tail of a young dinosaur that lived on a prairie in southern Alberta, Canada, is home to the remains of a 60-million-year-old tumor.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday it is preparing for the new coronavirus, which has killed at least 1,115 and sickened more than 45,000 worldwide, to “take a foothold in the U.S.”

“At some point, we are likely to see community spread in the U.S. or in other countries,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters on a conference call. “This will trigger a change in our response strategy.”

DNA is essentially a storage molecule. It contains all of the instructions a cell needs to sustain itself. These instructions are found within genes, which are sections of DNA made up of specific sequences of nucleotides. In order to be implemented, the instructions contained within genes must be expressed, or copied into a form that can be used by cells to produce the proteins needed to support life.

The instructions stored within DNA are read and processed by a cell in two steps: transcription and translation. Each of these steps is a separate biochemical process involving multiple molecules. During transcription, a portion of the cell’s DNA serves as a template for creation of an RNA molecule. (RNA, or ribonucleic acid, is chemically similar to DNA, except for three main differences described later on in this concept page.) In some cases, the newly created RNA molecule is itself a finished product, and it serves an important function within the cell. In other cases, the RNA molecule carries messages from the DNA to other parts of the cell for processing. Most often, this information is used to manufacture proteins. The specific type of RNA that carries the information stored in DNA to other areas of the cell is called messenger RNA, or mRNA.