CyanVac LLC, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing intranasal vaccines using a proprietary transformational parainfluenza virus 5 (PIV5)-based vector, announced preclinical data in a hamster model using CVXGA1, a COVID-19 vaccine candidate currently in Phase 1 clinical trials. The data show that CVXGA1, which expresses the Spike protein from the original strain (WA1) of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19 disease), provides broad protection against other SARS-CoV-2 strains including alpha, delta and omicron variants. In the hamster model, a single intranasal dose of CVXGA1 induced broad serum neutralizing antibodies against, and protected animals against disease challenge by, the WA1 and other strains. In addition, hamsters that received CVXGA1 as a single intranasal booster dose after two doses of an mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine had higher levels of neutralizing antibodies against multiple SARS-CoV-2 strains than hamsters who were boosted with a third mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine dose, and were also better protected against viral challenge.
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The manuscript describing these data, entitled “Efficacy of Parainfluenza Virus 5 (PIV5)-vectored Intranasal COVID-19 Vaccine as a Single Dose Vaccine and as a Booster against SARS-CoV-2 Variants,” is available on a preprint server at https://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2022.06.07.495215v1 and has been submitted for potential publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
“We are excited to see that our intranasal vaccine candidate, though based on the ancestral strain, can provide broad protection against different SARS-CoV-2 variants,” said Dr. Biao He, founder and CEO of CyanVac. “What’s more, it provides robust protection when used as a single dose booster for previously vaccinated hamsters. If similar effects are seen in humans, it could make our PIV5-based intranasal COVID-19 vaccine a compelling alternative to injectable vaccines.”
“This work also highlights the ‘plug and play’ capabilities of our proprietary PIV5 platform,” said Hong Jin, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer of CyanVac. “We have successfully generated and tested additional candidate vaccines encoding the Spike protein from variants like delta and omicron, and also a candidate vaccine that encodes both the COVID Spike and nucleocapsid proteins. This demonstrates that we can rapidly respond to emerging variants.”