In January 2024, Vaxart announced that the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) has awarded the organisation $9.27 million to support preparation for a Phase IIb clinical study to evaluate Vaxart’s oral pill XXB COVID-19 vaccine candidate. The study will involve 10,000 subjects and compare the candidate with an approved mRNA vaccine.
Project NextGen is the Department of Health and Human Services’ initiative worth $5 billion, which aims to support the development of new and innovative vaccines and therapeutics to provide broader and more durable protection against COVID-19 than the first generation of COVID-19 interventions. Vaxart’s platform offers “many” of the features that BARDA is looking for, including the generation of mucosal immunity and provision of a cross-reactive response to many variants.
A revolution
Dr Michael Finney, Vaxart’s Interim Chief Executive Officer, is “honoured to receive this BARDA award, which will support the innovative approach of our oral pill vaccine platform”.
“We believe our oral pill vaccine platform may ultimately hold the promise of revolutionising how we fight pandemics and how we vaccinate against several infectious diseases. Our team is very excited about this contract, which allows us to prepare to move forward with our oral COVID vaccine programme, together with BARDA.”
Dr James F. Cummings, Vaxart’s Chief Medical Officer, identified “two important ways” that the company has the chance to “improve on existing vaccines”.
“First, a thermostable pill vaccine such as Vaxart’s offers the chance to overcome needle-phobia, a documented obstacle to vaccination, and offers the potential to make it easier to vaccinate more people faster than with traditional injected vaccines. Second, our previous research on other vaccine constructs found Vaxart’s oral pill vaccine to be cross-reactive against all tested SARS-CoV-2 variants and to trigger long-lasting immune responses, potentially offering broader, longer protection.”
Dr Cummings states that the vaccine triggers “both a systemic and mucosal response”.
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