Pioneering needle-free Covid vaccine begins trials

The vaccine – known as DIOS-CoVax – has been developed by Professor Jonathan Heeney at the University of Cambridge and spin-out company DIOSynVax.

It is envisaged as a booster targeting SARS-CoV-2 and relatives that threaten future coronavirus pandemics.

This next generation vaccine is administered through a needle-free ‘injection’ – a blast of air that delivers it into the skin.

It has already been part of safety trials conducted at the NIHR Southampton Clinical Research Facility, but now recruitment is being expanded to Cambridge.

Professor Heeney said:

“We’re excited to be bringing our vaccine ‘home’ and are looking to recruit healthy volunteers to help in this crucial stage of development towards what we hope will eventually become a universal coronavirus vaccine.

“Our vaccine is innovative, both in terms of how it aims to protect against the virus responsible for our current pandemic and future coronaviruses, but also in how it is delivered."

How to get involved

The vaccine can be delivered pain-free without a needle into the skin, using the PharmaJet Tropis® intradermal Needle-free Injection System, which delivers the vaccine in less than a tenth of a second by spring-powered jet injection.

If the clinical trials are successful, the vaccine could be scaled up and manufactured as a powder to boost global vaccination efforts, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.

The clinical trials team at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (CUH) is looking for healthy volunteers aged 18-50 to take part in the study.

Volunteers will receive payment for their time, and participation on the trial will last around 12 months with volunteers attending 11 visits.

To find out more, contact the Project Management Team at cuh.dioscovaxtrial@nhs.net.

Funding for the development of the vaccine has come from Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation.

DIOSynVax is a spin-out company from the University of Cambridge, established in 2017 with the support of Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s commercialisation arm.

How the vaccine works

SARS-CoV-2 uses ‘spike’ proteins on its surface to gain entry to host cells.

These proteins bind to ACE2, a protein receptor on the surface of cells in our airways, allowing the virus to release its genetic material into the host cell.

The virus hijacks the host cell’s machinery to allow itself to replicate and spread.

Vaccines inform our bodies about what dangerous infections look like and how to respond to them.

This is much safer than becoming infected with the live virus, because it avoids the life-threatening effects the whole virus can have. Immunisation arms our immune system to look out for and block virus, or destroy cells that carry the spike protein, protecting us from Covid disease.

Unfortunately, SARS-CoV-2 is constantly mutating and the virus spike protein itself is changing.

This raises the prospect of ‘vaccine escape’, where changes to the spike protein mean the immune system is no longer able to recognise it.

To get around this problem, the Cambridge team searched for new types of antigens – key regions of the virus – that are the same across coronaviruses that occur in nature, including in animals that carry them, such as bats.

While most Covid vaccines use the Spike protein sequence encoded by the RNA of the sequences from a Wuhan Covid patient reported in January 2020, this new DIOSvax technology uses computational and protein structure methods to design broader vaccine antigens that mimic the wider group of coronaviruses that SARS-CoV-2 belongs, thus giving wider protection.

The body’s immune cells take up the vaccine, decode the DIOS-vaccine antigen and present the information to the immune system.

This in turn produces neutralising antibodies, which block virus infection, and T-cells, which remove virus-infected cells.

This technology is well-established and the vaccine plasmid DNA does not get taken up into human genetic material.