Lest we forget…
Last summer, as revenues fell dramatically from sales of Covid-19 drugs and jabs, Big Pharma needed another vaccine in the pipeline — a new market driver. Enter vaccines for RSV. The three new shots were released almost at the same time for babies and adults, and an RSV vaccine was approved soon after.
This week, we saw the NIH grant biotech company Vaxxas Pty. Ltd. of Australia a worldwide license to an RSV antigen known as DS2. The license will allow the company to create the first needle-free RSV vaccine. NIH actually developed the DS2 antigen at its very own Vaccine Research Center and farmed it out to yet another up and coming biotech company.
What could be better? Needle-free? It’s painless! And these new biotech companies always use novel, cutting edge technology, which sounds like it is safer and better, right? Except it isn’t.
The technology uses thousands of microprojections coated with a dried vaccine. The patch is applied to the skin to deliver the vaccine contents to immune cells just beneath the skin’s surface.
The platform itself has gone through five Phase I clinical trials; the specific RSV product is in preclinical development and will soon head to its first Phase I clinical study.
Vaxxas isn’t the only needle-free company; lots of this stuff is in development. Bill Gates funded Micron Biomedical in Atlanta (to the tune of nearly $25 million) to mass produce needle-free tech and to create a needle-free MMR vaccine. Micron just completed clinical trials in children in Gambia. Sound familiar? The usual government players (CDC, NIH and DoD) have given millions in grants to other companies developing like-mided tech.
And of course, everyone says the COVID pandemic was the catalyst for urgently developing this new tech. It all needs to be funded and fast-tracked because it is urgent!
RSV vaxxes are the next billion dollar deal. I said this 1.5 years ago in my two substacks on RSV (Part 1 and Part 2). That’s why it is our Throwback Thursday of the week.
The bottom line is that the new needle-free technology is designed to have more people accepting vaccines. The ultimate plan is that people could administer the patches to themselves. How great!
They’ll keep making it easier and easier, but that certainly does not equate to safer or even more effective.
