Hyderabad’s Biological E to get mRNA technology from WHO to produce Covid vaccines

Published
5th Apr, 2022

Context

Hyderabad-based vaccine manufacturer Biological E. Limited (BE) recently announced that it had been selected as a recipient of mRNA technology from the World Health Organisation (WHO) technology transfer hub.

About

About mRNA vaccines:

The first known demonstration of RNA vaccines was by scientists at Karolinska Institute in
The earliest known attempt to use mRNA against disease is attributed to Hungarian biochemist Katalin Kariko.
mRNA vaccines trick the body into producing some of the viral proteins itself.
They work by using mRNA, or messenger RNA, which is the molecule that essentially puts DNA instructions into action.
Inside a cell, mRNA is used as a template to build a protein.

How it works?

To produce an mRNA vaccine, scientists produce a synthetic version of the mRNA that a virus uses to build its infectious proteins.
This mRNA is delivered into the human body, whose cells read it as instructions to build that viral protein, and therefore create some of the virus’s molecules themselves.
These proteins are solitary, so they do not assemble to form a virus.
The immune system then detects these viral proteins and starts to produce a defensive response to them.

World Health Organisation

The WHO was established on 7 April 1948, which is commemorated as World Health Day.
It is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, with six semi-autonomous regional offices and 150 field offices worldwide.
The first meeting of the World Health Assembly (WHA), the agency’s governing body, took place on 24 July 1948.

The WHA, composed of representatives from all 194 member states, serves as the agency’s supreme decision-making body.
The WHA convenes annually and is responsible for selecting the Director-General, setting goals and priorities, and approving the WHO’s budget and activities.

The WHO is a specialised agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health.
It is part of the U.N. Sustainable Development Group.
The WHO Constitution, which establishes the agency’s governing structure and principles, states its main objective as ensuring “the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health.”