Intranasal vaccine confers broad mucosal and systemic immunity against SARS-CoV2

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-023-01423-6

by luu • 3 years ago

152 56 3 years ago

nature.com

yborg• 3 years ago

...in mice.

dsjoerg• 3 years ago

Great point and it's a step in the right direction.

rzzzt• 3 years ago

It might be a sampling error on my part, but I see all the murine model breakthroughs and pretty much none of the "this was tested on humans and it did work to some extent" announcements. Phase I is fine, I'm not picky.

"In mice" should be a prefix, not a suffix, eg. "Don't get your hopes up, but" or DGYHUB in short.

hughw• 3 years ago

There's a Twitter account https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice who simply links to articles whose titles could use a good "IN MICE"

version_five• 3 years ago

All author affiliations are Chinese institutions. For Americans it's probably not coming to a pharmacy near you. I don't have a sense of the global vaccine R&D landscape but I don't belive western countries ever got any chinese covid vaccines

davidw• 3 years ago

Our mRNA vaccines were 'better' from what I understand.

htss20132• 3 years ago

If mRNA is better, then why didn't the Chinese ever use it or produce a version of it? Maybe you could argue they were slow to get on the mRNA train at first, but years into the pandemic there is no plausible reason for them to not use the best technology.

They are fully capable of producing mRNA vaccines just as well as the West. IP rights have never been an issue for China. The claim that it's stubborn pride is also weak because they could simply tweak a few meaningless details and claim it's superior to the West's version.

maw• 3 years ago

I don't know about other countries but in Mexico they gave out Cansino and Sinovac among many others.

I count myself fortunate to live in an area where they were administering A-Z.

HillRat• 3 years ago

Yeah, Sinovac was useless; everyone I know in Mexico who got it came down repeatedly with COVID after vaccination, only improving after they were able to get AZ or the mRNA vaccines in the US. Hopefully this signals better vaccines on the horizon for China, given what they went through once lockdown collapsed there.

celdon25• 3 years ago

How often do you actually see news of "research breakthroughs" panning out as far as things you can actually buy later on? Chinese or not.

medvezhenok• 3 years ago

RadVac in the Boston area had an intranasal vaccine out by June of 2020. Not FDA approved/authorized, but quite a few people took it early on with little adverse consequences. About 6 months earlier than the first FDA authorized vaccines became available.

https://radvac.org/vaccine/

fsh• 3 years ago

There is no reason to believe that this actually worked. There were lots of vaccine candidates in early 2020, and many of them failed to produce a strong enough immune responce. This even happened to big corporations like Sanofi-GSK. The hard part is not to produce some vaccine candidates, but to test the safety and efficacy.

zamnos• 3 years ago

If we're playing who was first, BioNTech's mRNA vaccine was ready in the lab in January, right after COVID-19 was sequenced, and went into trials in April/May 2020. It's just they had to prove safety and efficacy (which to be clear, are paramount for a new medicine), along with scaling up production, before worldwide distribution.

https://impfung.biontech.de/en/impfung/project-lightspeed.ht...

TheRealPomax• 3 years ago

This should really have "in mice" added at the end of the title, even if the publication itself omits this because it's in the abstract. As published, this has effectively nothing to do with what people think it has anything to do with yet.

actuallyalys2• 3 years ago

I think the title should say that, but they did so some (very very limited) human research:

For proof of principle purposes, 5 co-authors of this report voluntarily took an intranasal spray of Ad5-S-Omicron that was prepared for clinical trial.

They then tested for immune response in "nasal lavage fluids," which apparently is the fluid collected after flushing out a test subject's nose with a saline solution, against the virus' spike and a psuedovirus. I don't know how the results in lavage fluids compares to similar neutralization studies they do for other kinds of vaccines, except that they also use psuedovirus sometimes.

timr8• 3 years ago

From a high level, the types of immunity seen in the nasal mucosa are completely different than the blood samples used for other kinds of vaccines. You'd expect to see antibodies in the mucosa.

The only saving grace of the existing vaccines is that the T/B-cell response induced is long-lasting and protective. Antibody response is a proxy for what you really care about (survival), and it's a crappy proxy for that, because antibodies rise and fall quickly even if your immune system is well-prepared for future exposures.

The traditional problem with nasal vaccines is that they induce a quick spike in antibodies in the mucosa, which then go away without the corresponding long-term rise in cellular immunity that is seen with injected vaccines.

jxramos5• 3 years ago

interesting netti pot effluent, that's a very fascinating fluid to work with and subject to focus diagnostics against. I'm pretty impressed.

Animats• 3 years ago

True. There have been many COVID vaccines that worked in mice, but not as well in humans. The early coronavirus vaccines worked really well in orangutans, well enough to prevent other orangs in the same cage from getting sick.

There are at least 44 intra-nasal vaccines in pre-clinical development.[1] Something is probably going to work.

[1] https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-04-potential-mucosal-cov...

BigCryo• 3 years ago

Time it's for real

DoreenMichele4• 3 years ago

Intranasal, but not intramuscular vaccination, elicited spike-specific respiratory mucosal IgA and residential T cell immune responses, in addition to systemic neutralizing antibodies and T cell immune responses against most Omicron subvariants.

SARS-CoV-2 infection starts in the upper respiratory system, where the nasopharyngeal tract is at the forefront. To prevent viruses from attaching and replicating at the mucosal epithelium, effective mucosal immunity in the airway is critically important.

Although only in mice, it does at least have a solid hypothesis for why they wish to do it this way.

jxramos5• 3 years ago

I heard this criticism recently that injection site has little relation to the natural point of infection and if you overlap the two there could be some stronger synergies elicited by the location somehow. Also you don't risk the accidental intravenous delivery which can have terrible outcomes when the syringe isn't first aspirated to sample if you hit some open vasculature along the way.

DoreenMichele4• 3 years ago

The entire reason the lungs are lined with mucus is to keep out invaders. So there's that.

andrekandre• 3 years ago

  > Also you don't risk the accidental intravenous delivery which can have terrible outcomes when the syringe isn't first aspirated to sample if you hit some open vasculature along the way.

how often does this happen?

EamonnMR• 3 years ago

Intranasal is only viable for people who are truly terrified of needles. Instead of a swollen arm you get the head cold experience. Never again; I hate getting pricked as much as the next guy but I really like being able to breathe through my nose.

ceejayoz• 3 years ago

Intranasal vaccination is believed to be potentially more effective because the nasal mucosa are where it enters the body.

From the link:

Some studies on respiratory viruses such as respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and influenza virus provide substantial evidence that mucosal immunity is key to the effective control of respiratory viruses.
However, almost all COVID-19 vaccines approved for human usage, including inactivated virus, lipid nanoparticle-encapsulated mRNA, protein subunit of spike or RBD, and adenovirus vectored vaccines, are administered via intramuscular injection. These vaccines can induce a systemic immune response that protects against severe disease and mortality but not a mucosal immune response and are insufficient in preventing upper respiratory infection and transmission, especially with the emergence of highly transmissible Omicron subvariants.

smegsicle• 3 years ago

tl;dr: different lymph nodes are activated by an injected vaccine than those which would be involved in first-line-defense against a real respiratory virus

perlgeek• 3 years ago

There have been several attempts at developing intranasal COVID-19 vaccines, all of them have had disappointing results so far (mostly that the immunity waned pretty quickly, if I remember correctly).

It would be far more convincing if the authors explicitly acknowledged that in the abstract, and gave a good reason why they think their approach is more promising.

Intranasal vaccine confers broad mucosal and systemic immunity against SARS-CoV2

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