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9The Nipah virus disease is a lethal infection that has led to 40% to 75% fatalities in Malaysia, 10 Bangladesh and India. The reports of human-to-human transmission documented in Bangladesh 11 has raised the specter of pandemic potential and has caused the World Health Organization to list 12 the Nipah virus as one of the pathogens to be considered for development of drugs and vaccines 13 on urgent basis, neither of which exist against the Nipah virus as of now, although many 14 proposals have been made and trials initiated. Given that there are established country-specific 15 differences in the virus' effects and fatalities, meeting the sudden need for a vaccine in case of an 16 epidemic will require design, development and preparation for a peptide vaccine. Thus, we 17 propose a protocol for creating peptide vaccines that can be tailor-made for these specific 18 countries, an approach which is being advocated for the first time. Here, we analyze the surface 19 proteins, Fusion protein and Glycoprotein, of the strains currently affecting the three countries on 20 a large scale and determine the specific country-based epitope differences. 21

We briefly review the situations arising out of epidemics that erupt rather suddenly, threatening life and livelihoods of humans. Ebola, Zika and the Nipah virus outbreaks are recent examples where the viral epidemics have led to considerably high degree of fatalities or debilitating consequences. The problems are accentuated by a lack of drugs or vaccines effective against the new and emergent viruses, and the inordinate amount of temporal and financial resources that are required to combat the novel pathogens. Progress in computational, biological and informational sciences have made it possible to consider design of synthetic vaccines that can be rapidly developed and deployed to help stem the damages. In this review, we consider the pros and cons of this new paradigm and suggest a new system where the manufacturing process can be decentralized to provide more targeted vaccines to meet the urgent needs of protection in case of a rampaging epidemic.

Human life has been at the edge of catastrophe for millennia due diseases which emerge and reemerge at random. The recent outbreak of the Zika virus (ZIKV) is one such menace that shook the global public health community abruptly. Modern technologies, including computational tools as well as experimental approaches, need to be harnessed fast and effectively in a coordinated manner in order to properly address such challenges. In this paper, based on our earlier research, we have proposed a four-pronged approach to tackle the emerging pathogens like ZIKV: (a) Epidemiological modelling of spread mechanisms of ZIKV; (b) assessment of the public health risk of newly emerging strains of the pathogens by comparing them with existing strains/pathogens using fast computational sequence comparison methods; (c) implementation of vaccine design methods in order to produce a set of probable peptide vaccine candidates for quick synthesis/production and testing in the laboratory; and (d) designing of novel therapeutic molecules and their laboratory testing as well as validation of new drugs or repurposing of drugs for use against ZIKV. For each of these stages, we provide an extensive review of the technical challenges and current state-of-the-art. Further, we outline the future areas of research and discuss how they can work together to proactively combat ZIKV or future emerging pathogens.

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