News from US Project NextGen:
The 3 vaccines from the USA chosen for Project NextGen are:
- Gritstone Bio’s self-amplifying mRNA vaccine aiming to be “variant-proof”;
- Covi-Vac/CoviLiv: A live virus intranasal vaccine from Codagenix; and
- Castlevax viral vector intranasal vaccine, from a Mount Sinai Hospital spin-off.
Mucosal vaccines:
- Mucosal vaccines are currently authorized for use in 6 countries: China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Morocco, and Russia. There are 5 of these vaccines: China has 2, and one of them is authorized in 3 countries:
- Ad5-nCoV (Convidecia Air) Viral vector (adenovirus) vaccine by by CanSino (China)
- BBV154 (iNCOVACC) Viral vector (adenovirus) intranasal vaccine by Bharat Biotech (India), using ChAd-SARS-CoV-2-S by Washington University in St Louis
- DNS1-RBD (Pneucolin) viral vector intranasal vaccine, by Beijing Wantai BioPharm (China)
- Razi Cov Pars Protein subunit by Razi Vaccine & Serum Research Institute (Iran)
- 27 have reached clinical trial, with at least one of those has been discontinued.
- 6 mucosal vaccines have reached phase 3 trials, including the 5 authorized vaccines.
In the case of Razi Cov Pars, the mucosal vaccine that has been out for the longest, it offers protection for up to 5 months. That’s an improvement on current mRNA vaccines, which protect against hospitalization for only 4 months (with protection peaking 1 month after you get it and declining from there). But “mucosal” really only describes the delivery route, different types of mucosal vaccines could be designed to be longer-lasting.
That’s one nice thing about variant-proof vaccines, we’ll probably need to take them once, or maybe once every couple of decades (if the Tonix variant-proof vaccine works out, at least).