As part of Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority’s (BARDA) Beyond the Needle program, Lumen Bioscience is working to create a new antibody cocktail for treatment of SARS-CoV-2, delivered intranasally.
Beyond the Needle, managed by the Division of Research Innovation and Ventures (DRIVe), seeks to make vaccines and therapeutics more usable and available by removing needles, syringes, vials and cold-chain distribution from the equation. Enter Lumen, which has the means to select an antibody to engineer and introduce into the spirulina chromosome to express antibodies, with a shelf-stable, edible or inhalable drug that requires no temperature-controlled storage.
If successful, it would be a boon to logistics and the greater supply chain. Spirulina itself already has a well-established safety profile and, for the world of pharmaceuticals, marks a fairly cheap manufacturing platform.
With BARDA’s help, Lumen will now develop and optimize an intranasal formulation of its anti-COVID-19 cocktail and analyze its efficacy in terms of both treatment and prevention. The manufacturing of this cocktail will be integrated into the company’s existing development-scale current good manufacturing process (cGMP) facility to confirm its suitability for future studies. Combined with that platform, the treatment could become quickly and cost-effectively deployable for countering infectious disease.
This is particularly notable as immunotherapy — the use of convalescent plasma or monoclonal antibodies — has proven highly effective in treatment and prevention of such diseases in the past, but is typically burdened by high production costs. By relying on intravenous measures, it can also be slow to distribute.