Entos Pharmaceuticals, a Canadian biotechnology company, is working on a DNA vaccine candidate for SARS-CoV-2 — the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 — and intends to test it on animal models.
The vaccine, produced using a proprietary drug delivery platform, offers yet another potential solution to the COVID-19 pandemic that can be delivered directly into patients’ cells and drive an internal immune response. Vaccine candidates are being manufactured, and, eventually, the company hopes to move to human trials.
“Given the urgency of the situation, we can have a lead candidate vaccine within two months. Once we have that, it’s a race to get it into clinical trials,” said John Lewis, CEO of Entos and a professor of oncology at the University of Alberta.
Lewis touts DNA-based vaccines like the one currently underway as holding some advantages over traditional vaccines. It’s all in how the product works: the ability to directly introduce nucleic acids into patients’ cells and cause them to make pieces of the virus to kick off a proper immune response without ever having to meet the full virus head-on. This, Lewis said, makes such vaccines easier to move into large-scale manufacturing, makes a more stable vaccine, and works without requiring infectious agents.
With the announcement, Entos joins a race many companies have already set to finish, all in an effort to end the COVID-19 pandemic. That pandemic has infected more than 400,000 people since its first outbreak in December 2019, according to World Health Organization figures, and has crippled the global economy.
Entos has also asked for financial support from provincial and federal levels of the Canadian government, and to partner with larger pharmaceutical companies with clinical trial experience.
“In times like this, where we’re in crisis, and a lot of lives are at stake worldwide, we need to look at innovative ways to more quickly determine the safety of new medicines and vaccines and get them into the clinic,” Lewis said. “We have the opportunity to save a lot of lives, and I think it’s really upon us and governments to find solutions for that.”