On Dec. 14, 2020, Codagenix and the Serum Institute of India announced that a Phase 1 clinical trial of COVI-VAC received regulatory approval by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and had commenced in London, UK.

COVI-VAC is a single-dose intranasal, live attenuated vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, that was shown to be safe and efficacious in preclinical animal studies. COVI-VAC was developed with Codagenix’s Synthetic Attenuated Virus Engineering (SAVE) platform that uses synthetic biology to re-code the genes of viruses into safe and stable vaccines.