Amid the coronavirus scare, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) on Thursday said that vaccines for the virus will take a minimum of 1.5 to 2 years to come into existence.

"Coronavirus is difficult to isolate but our first effort has been successful as now we have 11 such isolates. Figuring this isolate was a prime requisite for doing any kind of research. Now, we have a virus and it is safer to start from that base rather than the sequence of the gene to look at what should be the pretopes -- those which can lead to the development of the antibodies and what are those regions that should be used to vaccine," Dr Raman R Gangakhedar, head of ICMR told reporters in a press conference.