Vaxart Inc. (NASDAQ:VXRT) has announced its Q3 2020 financial results and offered a business update included on its oral coronavirus vaccine preclinical and clinical studies.
Vaxart’s oral COVID-19 vaccine easy to store, administer and distribute
Andrei Floroiu, the company’s CEO, said that to defeat COVID-19, there is a need for effective vaccines that are easy to store, distribute, and administer. He said that the company generated strong preclinical data and made considerable clinical progress, strengthening their belief that the oral COVID-19 vaccine will be a global solution against SARS-CoV-2 globally.
Vaxart’s VXA-CoV2-1 vaccine candidate is a single dose tablet offering convenient distribution and administration. This is because the COVID-19 vaccine tablet doesn’t require cold-chain distribution and storage.
Animal data indicate that VXA-Cov2-1 can activate mucosal and systemic immunity, unlike injectable vaccines. It shows a broader immune response with the potential of offering superior protection against the coronavirus. VXA-CoV2-1 leverages more than a decade’s work of tech platform building. The company is currently studying the vaccines to assess its ability to offer durable immunity after a single dose with good tolerability.
Recently the company completed enrolment in the Phase 1 VXA-CoV2-1 study. It also announced data from the COVID-19 Hamster Challenge Study demonstrating protection against the virus in hamsters that received two oral doses of the vaccines. Results showed protection against lung weight gains, systemic weight loss in the animals. There was also a 4-5 log viral load reduction in lungs, and the animals developed IgG titers of more than 10,000. Both the intranasal and oral VXA-CoV2-1 delivery conferred intranasal protection.
Vaxart expands collaboration for the manufacture of COVID-19 vaccine material
During the quarter, the company expanded its partnership with Kindred Biosciences to manufacture the COVID-19 vaccine. Kindred will scale the COVID-19 clinical study material onto mid-size bioreactors and manufacture at a 2000L scale. Vaxart and Attwill Vascular Technologies entered a master services agreement for processing, tableting, and lyophilizing compounds for the oral COVID-19 vaccine.
The company reported revenue of $265,000 in Q3 2020 and ended the quarter with $133.4 million in cash and cash equivalents.
