AstraZeneca nasal spray vaccine for Covid fizzles in small, early trial
AstraZeneca Plc’s nasal spray vaccine failed to elicit a strong immune response to Covid-19 in an early trial, a blow to the UK drug giant’s ambitions for developing an alternative approach to preventing the disease.
The spray vaccine didn’t provide a consistently strong immune response in the nasal mucosa tissue or in the rest of the body, University of Oxford researchers said in a statement. The vaccine was studied in 30 people as an initial immunization and in 12 as a booster, the statement said.
AstraZeneca’s injected Covid vaccine, also developed with scientists at Oxford’s Jenner Institute, hasn’t been as widely used as messenger RNA shots from Moderna Inc. and the partnership of Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE. Astra also makes Flumist, a flu vaccine in nasal spray form, which has been seen as an alternative to needles that can potentially give protection at the site of viral attack, the respiratory tract.
“We believe that delivery of vaccines to the nose and lungs remains a promising approach, but this study suggests there are likely to be challenges in making nasal sprays a reliable option,” Sandy Douglas, the trial’s chief investigator, said in a statement. “We urgently need more research to develop vaccines which can block transmission of respiratory pandemic viruses using delivery routes which are safe and practical at large scale.”
Earlier studies in China had supported the potential of a nasal vaccine, and a version has been licensed in India, although peer-reviewed data backing that product’s use hasn’t been released, Douglas said.
The Oxford trial, supported by AstraZeneca and the NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre, began in mid-2021, ended in 2022 and didn’t exclude participants based on prior infections. Douglas said that possible causes of failure include that the vaccine might get swallowed and destroyed in the stomach. The findings were published in the The Lancet’s eBioMedicine open access journal, the statement said.