On Mar. 18, 2020, Entos Pharmaceuticals, a health-care biotechnology company that develops new therapeutic compounds using the company’s proprietary drug-delivery platform, has begun manufacturing vaccine candidates against the novel coronavirus. The vaccine candidates will soon be tested in animal models as a first step before they are moved to human trials.

“Given the urgency of the situation, we can have a lead candidate vaccine within two months. Once we have that it’s a race to get it into clinical trials,” said John Lewis, CEO of Entos and a professor of oncology at the U of A.

Lewis said in comparison to a traditional vaccine, DNA-based vaccines hold several advantages. Nucleic acids are introduced directly into the patient’s own cells, causing them to make pieces of the virus–tricking the immune system into mounting a response without the full virus actually being present. The approach is recognized as being easier to move into large-scale manufacturing, offers improved vaccine stability and works without needing an infectious agent.

In the current absence of a vaccine for COVID-19, several companies around the world are mounting efforts to begin similar work. The first clinical trial using a DNA-based vaccine developed by Moderna began in Seattle, Wash., on March 13. Their approach allows for antibodies to be made in the human trial volunteers against a specific protein on the surface of the coronavirus that lets the virus enter human cells. The hope is that the antibodies will stop the interaction.

Though this approach is designed to be effective against COVID-19 specifically, Lewis said Entos is taking a different tack. The company plans to use plasmid DNA to amplify the production of key coronavirus surface and structural proteins with each injection, with an eye to the bigger picture.