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China has become the first country to green-light an inhaled Covid-19 vaccine, paving the way for the potential use of the needle-free product in the country, where curbing 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 vaccine.
The product, known as Convidecia Air, delivers a dose of vaccine through a puff of air from a nebulizer that is then inhaled by mouth.
CanSino Convidecia’s injectable Covid-19 vaccine is already in use in China and has been approved in a handful of other countries.
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According to a database maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO), CanSino’s new product is one of two specifically “inhaled” vaccines to have reached clinical stage development, as a number of companies around the world research ways innovative to provide Covid-19 protection through the nose and mouth.
The cleanup of the suction shock comes as multiple Chinese cities implement large-scale Covid lockdowns and mass testing 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 lockdowns since late August, affecting more than 300 million people, according to a CNN report.
A low vaccination rate among the elderly is a medical rationale used by Chinese authorities to justify ongoing disease control measures.
Meanwhile, new coronavirus variants have affected the protection provided by first-generation vaccines around the world, including vaccines produced in China that offer less robust antibody protection compared to mRNA vaccines developed in the West.
Booster and vaccination campaigns – and the development of next-generation products – are continuing within China.
It remains unclear what place the new inhaled vaccine will fill in this landscape. CanSino warned in a company filing that several regulatory steps remain before the vaccine can be brought to market and said its product will face “fierce competition” domestically, where nine vaccines have so far received authorization.
In a press release, CanSino said Convidecia Air “can promote strong humoral, cellular and mucosal immunity.”
The manufacturer did not provide data to support these claims, but referred to studies in the medical journal The Lancet.
In a small study published in August, CanSino researchers reported that in people injected with two doses of the CoronaVac vaccine, an inhaled vaccine booster increased antibody levels compared with a third injected dose of CoronaVac.
CoronaVac, an injectable developed by Beijing-based Sinovac and widely used in China and globally, uses a different type of technology than Convidecia, so the inhaled dose provided a heterologous, or mix-and-match, boost.
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The study did not test whether the inhaled dose kept people from becoming infected or prevented them from passing on Covid to others.
Globally, drugmakers are racing to make next-generation vaccines that could improve protection against Covid, including those that use innovative dosing methods. Clinical trials are underway to test more than a dozen spray vaccines to see if they can create so-called mucosal immunity.
This raises some antibodies in the nose and mouth, especially, in order to prevent an infection from taking hold in the first place.
There is hope that these non-injectable vaccines, which are given as drops, sprays or tablets in the mouth and nose, can also prevent the spread of infection from person to person – something that injected vaccines don’t do very well once new ones emerge. virus variants.
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 proteins to cells so the body can make antibodies against them.
None of CanSino’s products are authorized for use in the United States, but the World Health Organization earlier this year listed the injectable version of Convidecia for emergency use.
SOURCE: CNN. Header photo: Image online.
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