Scientists at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have been working on developing a heat-tolerant vaccine that can offer protection against different strains of SARS-CoV-2 which includes both current and future variants.

• The team has completed pre-clinical trials and is gearing up for the human testing of the vaccine candidate. 
• According to scientists the evolving nature of the virus and different mutations, they are not sure if the current vaccines can be helpful.
• Raghavan Varadarajan, Professor at the Molecular Biophysics Unit (MBU) has been leading this research project in collaboration with Mynvax, a startup since the beginning of the pandemic. 
• After analysing various proteins found in the virus, researchers selected two parts of SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein – the S2 subunit and the Receptor Binding Domain (RBD) – for the new vaccine.