Vaccine institute Intravacc is partnering with Wageningen Bioveterinary Research (WBVR) and Utrecht University on the development of an intranasal vaccine for Covid-19.
The partners will leverage Utrecht University’s coronavirus expertise, Intravacc’s FDA-approved Vero cell platform and WBVR’s ‘reverse genetics’ technique to genetically modify the Newcastle disease virus (NDV) vector to express the immunogenic spike (S) protein of SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes Covid-19.
Intravacc CEO Dr Jan Groen commented: “Intravacc’s strength is its ability of bridging the gap between academia and research centres towards pharma. Together with our partners WBVR and Utrecht University, we combine our expertise in developing an intranasal corona virus vaccine.
“Our safe Vero cell platform, widely used for the production of polio vaccines, put us in the position to fast track the production of pilot lot of this NDV vector-based vaccine concept and to subsequently transfer this to large vaccine manufactures.”
This comes hot on the heels of Intravacc announcing a partnership with US biotech Epivax for its intranasal vaccine for Covid-19. This collaboration leverages Intravacc’s Outer Membrane Vesicles (OMV) platform instead of the Vero technology.
