English firm to fight Covid with vaccine pills

A pill-based vaccine that could transform the fight against Covid is being developed by a Sussex biotech firm.

Burgess Hill-based iosBio has come up with a way to turn injected vaccines into orally administered tablets and is now working with Californian firm

ImmunityBio to test it in clinical trials. Such trials in monkeys have shown the oral vaccine made using iosBio technology to be highly effective. The jab version, developed by ImmunityBio, is already in phase 2-3 trials.

The oral vaccine will begin clinical trials on Americans this month and ImmunityBio is applying for regulatory approval to run tests in Britain too. Approval remains many months away if it happens at all, but a pill-based vaccine would be far easier to transport and administer than injections.

Wayne Channon, chief executive of iosBio, said: ‘‘With our capsule, you wouldn’t need medical professionals to administer the vaccine, you could send this out on Amazon Prime and have everyone vaccinated by

Saturday.’’

IosBio’s technology is called OraPro. It engineers vaccines into pills that can withstand temperatures of up to 50C, allowing them to pass through the stomach and be directly absorbed into the mucous membranes. Channon said: ‘‘You catch Covid in your mucosal cells. But with jabs you get injected into the arm which goes into the muscles and blood cells. Our tablets go straight into mucosal cells to illicit mucosal immunity so we hit the virus where it is. When you catch this virus, you breathe it in or swallow it, and 80 per cent of your immune system cells are mucosal, so we are addressing that directly. I think this will be a new paradigm in vaccination.’’

– Telegraph Group