The team of experts, led by the Vice Chancellor of the Dow University of Health Sciences, Professor Mohammad Saeed Quraishi, analyzed virus sequence from a locally infected patient’s body(host).
The experts say that determining the sequence is a remarkable step, which in turn will help in development of vaccine and treatment modalities. However, this is still a very early but key phase of research and more steps are yet to come. The Dow University lab is one of the first labs in the country to introduce the Corona virus PCR testing.
The fully equipped modern (BSL-3) virology lab at DUHS was used for the Isolation of RNA from the sample and through PCR the presence of virus was confirmed. The virus was transmitted to the boy locally but research shows that this virus has came from Saudi Arabia and it has infected 15 patients of same family. Which indicates that the local spread of this virus is very fast. Genome sequence revealed that the sequence of this virus is slightly different from wuhan virus with few mutations.
This virus has originated in china and came to Pakistan through Saudi Arabia. Moreover, it is to be noted that this is just one of the invested cases and while we are in the process of analyzing many other samples that has been transmitted from other countries including IRAN, IRAQ, SYRIA, UK, U.S. etc. and the research on it is still going. Dow university’s fully equipped lab has conducted hundreds of people’s corona virus tests free of cost and it is still conducting.
