Prof SS Vasan (right) with a team member at the CSIRO lab in Australia, where the virus is being grown
In a major breakthrough for global preclinical response to the novel coronavirus (nCoV) outbreak, a team led by an overseas citizen of India has grown the first batch of the virus outside China in sufficient stocks to cater to forthcoming studies in the highsecurity lab of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia.
While researchers at Australia’s Doherty Institute had last week managed to isolate the virus from a human sample, the growth of the virus at CSIRO assumes importance given that it has the mega scale needed to conduct precli