Candidate: Vaccine to prevent COVID-19
Category: VAX
Type: Vaccine based on proprietary and orally active, live-attenuated bacterial vaccine platform. The technology uses the approved typhoid fever vaccine Salmonella Typhi Ty21a as a carrier strain.
Status: Aeterna Zentaris said March 15 it entered into an exclusive worldwide sub-licensable patent and know-how license agreement for a potential COVID-19 vaccine currently in preclinical development that was invented at the Julius-Maximilians-University Wuerzburg in Germany, exercising an option announced on February 2. The company also entered into a research agreement with the University to conduct supplementary research activities and preclinical development studies on the potential vaccine.
Aeterna said it plans to select from a set of vaccine candidates to perform further in vitro and in vivo characterization before selecting the most active and stable bacterial strain for further preclinical and potentially clinical development. The company aims to develop an oral dosage form of COVID-19 vaccine which is also active against mutated viruses that can be stored in a common fridge and manufactured with relatively low costs of goods.
COVID-19: 300 Candidates and Counting
To navigate through the >300 potential therapeutic and vaccine options for COVID-19, GEN has grouped the candidates into four broad categories based on their developmental and (where applicable) clinical progress:
● FRONT RUNNER – the most promising therapeutics/vaccines based on clinical progress, favorable data or both.
● DEFINITELY MAYBE – earlier phases with promising partners, or more advanced candidates in development that have generated uneven data.
● KEEPING AN EYE ON… – interesting technology, attracting notable partners, or both, but preliminary data.
● TOO SOON TO TELL – longshots pending additional experimental and/or clinical data.
GEN has also tagged the most common treatment types:
● ANTIVIRAL
● VAX
● ANTIBODY
● RNA
