On Oct. 4, 2022, Washington University in St. Louis announced it had licensed the rights to develop, manufacture and commercialize its proprietary COVID-19 nasal vaccine in the United States, Europe and Japan to Ocugen. A nasal vaccine is thought to provide greater protection against the virus than current injectable vaccines, which help prevent severe illness and death but do little to prevent infections.

The advantage of the nasal vaccine is that it delivers a boost to immunity in the nose and upper respiratory tract, right where the virus enters the body, thereby potentially preventing infections altogether.

Ocugen intends to work closely with U.S. government agencies tasked with pandemic preparedness and response to initiate clinical trials and manufacture the intranasal vaccine. The company also is interested in the potential for the nasal vaccine to be a universal booster, regardless of a person’s previous COVID-19 vaccination history.

The Washington University nasal vaccine technology was previously licensed to Bharat Biotech International Limited in 2020 for development in India and limited parts of the world. This September, health authorities in India approved the vaccine for emergency use in that country, making it the world’s first intranasal vaccine for COVID-19 to be approved.

The investigational nasal vaccine was co-developed by Washington University scientists David T. Curiel, MD, PhD, the Distinguished Professor of Radiation Oncology, and Michael S. Diamond, MD, PhD, the Herbert S. Gasser Professor of Medicine, of molecular microbiology and of pathology and immunology, with members of their laboratories. They started collaborating in early 2020, as the virus that causes COVID-19 first began its wildfire-like spread across the globe.