Medical Microbiology in India: the recent developments in the basic research, diagnostics and vaccines

Abstract

Medical microbiology being the largest subset under microbiology brings out the benefits of the research in the field of microbiology for the welfare of the masses through applied medical science. Researchers around the globe are working tirelessly in this field in order to prevent, diagnose and treat infectious diseases well in time. India being a tropical country with poor socio-economic conditions and slack healthcare schemes has wide range and burden of the infectious diseases. This has led to the researchers here to take up the challenging tasks of medical microbiology research, they are actively working and the present article reviews the exemplary contribution of these researchers from India in the last decade. This enlists the basic research carried to assess the infections caused by Rotavirus, Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV),

Microbiology in India: status, challenges and scope

“…A walk through the research topics of the last couple of decades reflects that majorly research in this arena is driven toward understanding the biochemistry and genetics of microbes and viruses causing these infectious diseases. Indian microbiologists have focused greatly on pathogens including Mycobacterium tuberculosis, M. leprae, Salmonella typhi, Helicobacter pylori, Yersinia enterocolitica, Leishmania spp., Plasmodium falciparum, Vibrio cholerae and Wuchereria bancrofti (Virdi et al, 2020). These studies apart from adding to the existing repertoire of basic information on infectious diseases have also led to the development of precise and rapid tests and kits for the detection of HIV, tuberculosis, virulent typhoid, leprosy, dengue and cholera that have played a crucial role in containing the spread of highly contagious diseases.…”

“…Blessed with nearly four terrestrial biodiversity hotspots, India is a land of diverse ecosystems (Singh and Chaturvedi, 2017; Sharma et al ., 2018) that has offered innumerable opportunities to researchers and scientists to study the environments through a microbial lens (Gupta et al ., 2020; Singh et al ., 2020). Despite its rapid economic growth and increasing technological power, India faces numerous challenges, including overpopulation and waste generation (Vijgen et al ., 2011) as well as the emergence and prevalence of a large number of diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, cholera and HIV infections, and other neglected diseases (Virdi et al ., 2020). Over the years, microbiology in India has focused on microbial diseases and pathogens, vaccines, industrial and agricultural applications of microbes, systematics and taxonomy, genomics and metagenomics (Lal, 2012; Sharma et al ., 2018; Hira et al ., 2019).…”

“…With the eradication of smallpox and the country's declaration of poliomyelitis‐free status in January 2011, there has been a greater focus on not just the design of vaccines but also their mass manufacture. Indian microbiologists have developed vaccines such as Mycobacterium indicus pranii (against certain Mycobacterial infections), Rotavac (against rotavirus), Covaxin, JENVAC (against Japanese encephalitis, and recombinant vaccine DENVs (against dengue virus) that have found widespread use (Virdi et al ., 2020; Desai et al ., 2022). It is also worth mentioning that the country staged cholera and typhoid vaccine trials, as well as plague vaccine research and development (Lahariya, 2014).…”