Israeli scientist granted US patent for novel coronavirus vaccine design

In a major breakthrough, an Israeli scientist at the Tel Aviv University has been granted a US patent for his innovative vaccine design for the corona family of viruses, a press statement by the varsity said on Sunday.

The patent has been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

The vaccine is proposed by Professor Jonathan Gershoni of the School of Molecular Cell Biology and Biotechnology at the university's George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences.

It targets the novel coronavirus' Achilles' heel, its Receptor Binding Motif (RBM), the most vulnerable point in a Coronavirus' structure, a critical form that enables the virus to bind to and infect a target cell.

The development of the vaccine could still take several months before it goes for clinical trials, it said.

"The vaccine would reconstruct the coronavirus' RBM, a tiny feature of its spike protein. Though the virus uses many different proteins to replicate and invade cells, the spike protein is the major