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Bharat Biotech to Start Trial on Nasal COVID-19 Vaccine

by Angela Mohan on Mar 15 2021 11:45 AM

Bharat Biotech nasal COVID-19 vaccine, if approved after clinical trials, could prove to be a game-changer.

Bharat Biotech to Start Trial on Nasal COVID-19 Vaccine
Bharat Biotech may begin clinical trials for an intranasal COVID-19 vaccine candidate, called BBV154, soon in Patna, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Nagpur on 175 participants.
This Hyderabad-based firm begun the recruitment process for the clinical trial and the ethics committees of these trial sites are yet to provide approval for trials, India Today reported.

All the COVID-19 vaccines against coronavirus are intramuscular till now. Krishna Ella, Chairman of Bharat Biotech had earlier said the company is beginning an intranasal vaccine a country like India needs 2.6 billion syringes and needles which may add up to pollution.

An intranasal vaccine will be easy to administer, non-invasive, reduce the use of medical consumables such as needles, syringes, etc. and "One drop of vaccine in each of the nostrils is sufficient," he had said.

Bharat Biotech has tied up with the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis to develop an intranasal vaccine for COVID-19.

Drugs Controller General of India's (DGCI) subject expert committee deliberated on the application and recommended granting permission for Phase 1 trials on Tuesday.

As per Bharat Biotech’s website, “An intranasal vaccine stimulates a broad immune response neutralizing IgG, mucosal IgA, and T cell responses and creates an immune response at the site of infection (in the nasal mucosa) essential for blocking both infection and transmission of COVID-19.”

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“It will be cheaper and cost-effective and there would be ease of administration with no injections,” says Dr Sanjeev Bagai, an avid vaccine watcher and chairman at the Nephron Clinic in Delhi. Bharat Biotech has said that the scalability to manufacture this would help meet the global demand.

“The nasal route has excellent potential for vaccination due to the organized immune systems of the nasal mucosa,” says Dr Bagai.

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“Eight-two per cent of SARSCoV2 transmission occurs through the nasal passage. It takes 6-15 hours for the virus to zone into hAlveolar type 2 cells in the lungs to precipitate the cytogenic release to cause ARDS.

The concentration of ACE2R is maxed in the nasal passage. The sentinel cells around the nerves are rich in receptors to cause invasion of the host,” explains Dr Bagai.

“The protein enzyme called Neuropilin is responsible to cause the fusion to host. Neuropilin is in high concentration in sentinel nasal cells. The IgA maximizes in the nasal area by 29 per cent. This causes quicker protection and response to the vaccine. Therefore, it’s a very good move,” says Dr Bagai.

“A vaccine administered intranasally, if approved after clinical trials, will be a game-changer. Some of the adverse effects related to vaccination can be attributed to how injections are administered. An intranasal vaccine, if proved to be free of adverse effects, will help in improving the vaccine coverage.

Since the virus harbours in the nasopharynx, it will be interesting to examine its efficacy in inducing local immunity. If yes, then this might turn out to be better than other vaccines in terms of preventing the infection,” says Professor Giridhara Babu.

“The nasal vaccine can have high compliance as it would be ideally suited for children and adults,” says Bharat Biotech.

Dr Bagai, a practicing pediatrician, also believes so. “It is an inactivated vector-based vaccine, so it’s safe for children,” he says.

The company has said that mice, hamsters and macaques were immunized from SARS-CoV-2 after they were given a single dose of ChAd-SARS-CoV-2-S. Viral clearance was observed in both lower and upper airways in all these animal models, the company said.



Source-Medindia


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