Centre Overview

Viruses of medical importance are becoming rampant as evident by the recent wave of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Corona Virus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) which has posed an unprecedented challenge to the scientific and medical world for the control of transmission, understanding pathogenicity of mutating variants and ultimately developing a robust strategy to control the disease at clinical and public health levels. The country needs multiple centres to monitor the currently circulating viruses of medical importance, explore the fundamental knowledge required to understand their transmission, pathogenicity and develop tools to diagnose these early, before this causes any irreversible damage to human health. The nature of viruses is such that they continue to emerge and re-emerge as different variants as they travel from one host to other. Whenever our body is infected by any viral disease, our immune cells respond towards these. Hence fundamental knowledge about immune mechanisms, molecular characterization and development of appropriate drug targets as well as the safe vaccines is required to address the future challenges of endemic, epidemic and pandemic viruses.