CNN
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China has become the first country to greenlight an inhaled Covid-19 vaccine, paving the way for potential use of the needle-free product in the country, where suppressing the spread of Covid-19 remains a top priority.
The vaccine maker, CanSino Biologics, said in a statement on Sunday that China’s drug regulator had approved the inhaled dose for emergency use as a booster shot.
The product, known as Convidecia Air, delivers a dose of vaccine through a puff of air from a nebulizer which is then inhaled through the mouth. CanSino’s Convidecia Covid-19 injected vaccine is already in use in China and has been approved in a handful of other countries.
According to a database maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO), CanSino’s new product is one of two specifically “inhaled” vaccines that have reached the clinical development stage, while a number of Companies around the world are looking for innovative ways to deliver Covid-19 protection through the nose and mouth.
The authorization of the inhaled shot comes as several Chinese cities impose large-scale Covid lockdowns and mass testing campaigns in response to small-scale outbreaks.
The country continues to adhere to a strict zero-Covid policy, even as the rest of the world learns to live with the virus.
More than 70 Chinese cities have been placed under full or partial Covid lockdown since late August, impacting more than 300 million people, according to a CNN tally.
A low vaccination rate among the elderly is one of the medical reasons cited by Chinese authorities for the ongoing disease control measures.
Meanwhile, new variants of the coronavirus have impacted the protection offered by first-generation vaccines around the world, including Chinese vaccines that offer less robust antibody protection than mRNA vaccines developed in the West.
Booster and vaccination campaigns – and the development of next-generation products – are underway in China.
It remains to be seen what place the new inhaled vaccine will occupy in this landscape. CanSino warned in a company filing that some regulatory steps remained before the vaccine could be marketed, and said its product would face “fierce competition” domestically, where nine vaccines have so far received permission.
In a press release, CanSino stated that Convidecia Air “can induce strong humoral, cellular and mucosal immunity.”
The manufacturer did not provide data to support these claims, but referred to studies published in the medical journal The Lancet.
In a small study published in August, CanSino researchers reported that in people who received two injected doses of the CoronaVac vaccine, a booster of the inhaled vaccine increased antibody levels compared to a third injected dose of CoronaVac.
CoronaVac, a vaccine developed by Beijing-based Sinovac widely used in China and around the world, uses a different type of technology from Convidecia, so the inhaled dose provided a heterologous, or mix-and-match, boost. .
The study did not test whether the inhaled dose prevented people from becoming infected or prevented them from transmitting Covid to others.
Globally, drugmakers are racing to make next-generation vaccines that can improve protection against Covid, including those that use innovative dose delivery methods.
Clinical trials are underway to test more than a dozen spray vaccines to see if they can create so-called mucosal immunity. This stimulates certain antibodies in the nose and mouth, in particular, in an effort to prevent an infection from taking hold in the first place.
There is hope that these non-injected vaccines, which are given as drops, sprays or tablets in the mouth and nose, may also prevent the infection from spreading from person to person. – which injected vaccines don’t do very well after new variants of the virus emerge.
CanSino’s Convidecia vaccine is similar to the Johnson & Johnson and Oxford AstraZeneca vaccines. It uses a harmless virus called an adenovirus to transmit instructions for making Covid spike proteins into cells so the body can create antibodies against them.
None of CanSino’s products have been cleared in the United States, but the World Health Organization earlier this year listed the injected version of Convidecia for emergency use.
