Can proteomics-based approaches further help COVID-19 prevention and therapy?

The first patient with coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was reported in December 2019 in Wuhan, Hubei province, China. Since then, more than 149.471 million COVID-19 cases have been reported worldwide, with over 3.15 million deaths. The rapid spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection or COVID-19 has made researchers focus on developing an effective vaccine to prevent the disease. One hundred and eighty-four vaccine candidates in pre-clinical development have been tested on different animal models of SARS-CoV-2 infection (Source WHO; Draft landscape and tracker of COVID-19 candidate vaccines (who.int)). An additional 63 vaccines are currently in clinical development. Thus, more than 200 vaccine candidates have been developed within almost a year of the first reported case of COVID-19, and of these, 10 vaccines have been approved for human use (Table 1). The first human trial of a COVID-19 vaccine started on 6 March 2020, and the rapid pace of vaccine development would not have been feasible without a combined proteomics and genomics approach against SARS-CoV-2. Table 1. Different vaccines approved for human use to prevent COVID-19