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Audio Interview

Development of an intranasal vaccine for SARS-CoV-2

Published on April 28, 2020   15 min

Other Talks in the Playlist: Interviews on Covid-19

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Interviewer: Dr. Scot Roberts, welcome and thank you for taking the time to do this interview with us today to discuss Altimmune's efforts in developing a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. Let me start by asking you about previous efforts already deployed to create novel vaccines. Altimmune is currently testing at least two vaccines in clinical trials, one for the 'flu and another for anthrax. What is the general mechanism by which recombinant adenoviral vaccines induce immunity? Dr. Roberts: Let me start by saying it's a pleasure to be here today. The approach to create our vaccines makes use of a viral vector to deliver the antigen to the host (the patient) so that it can develop an immune response. That approach is really quite different from the vaccines that most of us are familiar with and that we've grown up with. Those vaccines are typically administered as a shot into the muscle and what they're doing is presenting proteins to the immune system, usually the pathogen that you're trying to make a vaccine against, the virus or bacterium in a killed form. They present those proteins outside of cells to the immune system primarily B-cells and antigen-presenting cells, and those cells see the proteins and then can initiate an immune response that can allow you to respond more quickly if you encounter that pathogen again. That's the old technology, but our approach is to use a live viral vector that's been disabled, so that it can no longer replicate once it infects the cells inside your nose, because we use intranasal administration. The advantage of using that approach is that the virus,
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Development of an intranasal vaccine for SARS-CoV-2

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