Biosciences Faculty Submits Projects for National Level Research on Coronavirus

The emergency situation that has arisen as a result of the corona pandemic has engaged scientists actively in research to combat the virus. With the spread of the COVID-19 in Pakistan, some national agencies have announced funding of projects for research in the field. Scientists from Virtual University of Pakistan have also taken an initiative and submitted various projects to these funding agencies. This includes teams from Microbiology, Biotechnology and Molecular Biology. A total of 4 research projects have been submitted for approval to Pakistan Science Foundation (PSF), Higher Education Commission (HEC) under the Rapid Research and Innovation Initiative on COVID-19 and Pakistan Council for Science & Technology (PCST). The projects involve research on the development of rapid diagnostic kits, development of ELISA-based diagnosis, and production of vaccine against corona virus in animal models. The projects have been submitted by Dr. Muhammad Tariq Pervez (Associate Professor, Department of Bioinformatics & Computational Biology), Dr. Asif Nadeem (Associate Professor, Department of Biotechnology), Dr. Abdul Wajid (Assistant Professor, Department of Biotechnology), Dr. Ayesha Maqbool (Assistant Professor, Department of Molecular Biology) and Dr. Tanveer Hussain (Associate Professor, Department of Molecular Biology) involving faculty members from Life Sciences along with national and international collaborators.