These are days in which a simple sneeze can spark a panic attack -- or worse, signal the beginning of a nightmare. The Covid-19 pandemic has created a global scare and thousands of new cases are being detected every hour. The things we took for granted -- the daily commute to school, college or office, hanging out with friends, even shopping -- are all things we have had to forsake. We live with the fear that any one of us can be the next target of the novel coronavirus -- which causes a disease against which there is no vaccine for prevention or drug for cure, yet.

While doctors and other healthcare providers continuously battle to provide adequate treatment to patients and help them recover, scientists and researchers are working tirelessly to dissect the Sars-Cov2 -- the pathogen which causes Covid-19 -- and find a vaccine or a cure.

But a vaccine is not a miracle that can be wished into existence one fine day. It takes long and painstaking research and needs to go through different stages before it can make it to a pharmacy. A vaccine, as many of you may know, is a biological preparation that protects an individual from a specific disease by stimulating our immune system beforehand. There are different types of vaccines -- some use the whole virus (weakened or inactivated), some a part of it (subunit) and each has its own set of pros and cons.

Right now, different research institutes and biotech companies are aggressively focussing their energy on developing a vaccine against the coronavirus. Tiba Biotech, a Boston-based pre-clinical biotechnology company, is one such. 'We are working on a prototype Sars-Cov2 vaccine to help in the current emergency. However, it is important to emphasise that we are still in an early stage in the development of a safe and effective vaccine,' says Poulami Talukder, research scientist at Tiba Biotech.

A vaccine is first tested in the laboratory and then confirmed in the animal model. It can go for clinical trials in humans only after that. The protective efficacy, toxicity and side effects of a vaccine need to be closely monitored -- that is why it requires such a long time to develop one. Even though the current pandemic poses an urgent need for a vaccine, we must ensure that all the parameters are first ticked off. Otherwise, the vaccine may show serious side effects -- the last thing we want at this critical juncture. Scientists predict that 12-18 months will be required to develop a vaccine.

Explains Talukder, 'We are aiming to develop an mRNAbased vaccine. Covid-19 has inspired the scientific community in ways that no other outbreak has before. Many of the world's researchers are focussed urgently on a single topic and are working collaboratively, setting aside personal progress.' Talukder did her master's in chemistry from IIT Kharagpur be- fore moving to Arizona State University, US, for her doctoral degree and to the University of California, San Francisco, for postdoctoral research. Since her team is using the sequence of the virus -- and not the virus itself -- to de- velop the mRNA vaccine, the risk for the researchers is minimal.

Other groups aiming to develop different types of vaccine may need to use the virus for experiments. These researchers and scientists need to take adequate protection while working with the virus or patient samples to develop diagnostic kits, vaccines or drug discovery, otherwise they risk being infected while handling these contagious agents. 'Tiba has implemented a scheduled disinfectant routine, appropriate protective gear and team rotations to manage the density of people working in the lab. We are working safe and working smart,' says Talukder, who was fascinated by bioorganic chemistry and wished to study the interface of biology and chemistry in her younger days in India.

Like Talukder and her group at Tiba, there are various other groups elsewhere working on vaccine development round the clock so as to help us tide over the raging pandemic. With the number of worldwide cases having crossed 1.8 crores and claimed more than 1.1 lakh lives so far, there is a pressing need to curb the spread.

'For Covid-19, one of the challenges the is the lack of research tools. The virus is new, thus we have had limited time to create reagents necessary to study it and validate potential treatments. Lack of an animal model is also a significant hurdle,' says Talukder who hails from Coochbehar in West Bengal and has been actively working on synthesising nanoparticle formulations for creating nucleic acid vaccines with improved efficacy at Tiba Biotech.

There is a gamut of challenges these scientists and researchers are facing while they work fervently each day to gift us a formulation that would allow us to return to normal life. Till that happens, let us follow the gold standard of being healthy and thank these unsung heroes working in laboratories all over the world.