Pills could replace Covid jabs with biotech breakthrough

The innovation could change the fight against Covid-19. Photo / Getty Images

A groundbreaking pill-based vaccine which could one day 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 the technology in clinical trials.

Clinical 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 two/three 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 and could drastically speed up the race to immunise the world's population.

Wayne Channing, 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.

Mr Channing 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 breath it in or swallow it, and 80pc of your immune system cells are mucosal so we are addressing that directly. I think this will be a new paradigm in vaccination."

Under the terms of the licensing agreement, ImmunityBio has exclusive rights to OraPro. In return, IosBio will get royalties on global sales of the approved vaccine.

Mr Channing said: "The results from the non-human primate trial were outstanding for oral and I think oral is the right strategy.

"Patrick Soon-Shiong, the chief executive of ImmunityBio, called me and said he had woken up at 3am and thought, this should be an oral vaccine."

ImmunityBio's vaccine is a viral vector vaccine, and unlike other candidates it contains two different spike proteins, Mr Channing said.

He said: "When you use both the chance of both mutating on the virus to a point where it is unrecognisable to the body is vanishingly small and you get a much longer T-cell response memory."

IosBio is a small private company owned by a handful of independent shareholders. Mr Channing, chief scientific officer Jeff Drew and James Hudleston, a financier and founder of Hurricane Energy, control more than half the company between them.

The other shareholders include friends, family, wealthy people and "not so wealthy people", according to Mr Channing. The company has raised £20m since being founded in 2005.

The technology is the brainchild of Dr Drew. Mr Channing said: "It was one of his pet projects we worked on and he persuaded a few of us to fund it.

"When the company was founded it was almost impossible to get traction with big pharma - nobody seemed interested and nobody seemed to realise the problem with global distribution of frozen vaccines. It wasn't until the pandemic that everyone understood the problem and needed the technology.

"So we changed our strategy a while ago to become a vaccine developer too, rather than just trying to license out the technology, mainly because we couldn't get the big guys to change what they were doing."

- Telegraph Media Group