Mount Sinai is readying its clinical archers and manning the research cannons as it spins out a new vaccine company to target infectious diseases and fortify against future pandemics.
The new company—crowned CastleVax—has been established to develop vaccines against “current and potential future pandemic threats, as well as diseases of profound unmet medical need,” according to an announcement Friday. The foundation of CastleVax is a novel vaccine platform developed by a trio of scientists at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine.
Built by Peter Palese, Ph.D, Adolfo García-Sastre, Ph.D, and Florian Krammer, Ph.D, the platform uses a Newcastle disease virus (NDV) as a transporter to display other proteins native to viruses of concern, including the virus that causes COVID-19. The hope is that this method could be replicated with a bevy of problem proteins to develop vaccines for current and future infectious diseases.
NDV itself is part of the avian paramyxovirus family and not harmful to humans, making itself an ideal decoy that can display other disease-causing proteins. The researchers say this platform has already been used to develop intranasal and intramuscular vaccines targeting new COVID-19 variants, including omicron. The nasal spray version is currently being evaluated for its ability to “induce mucosal immunity," something scientists say could help blunt transmission of the virus. As the virus has continued to mutate, the efficacy against infection of the currently authorized or approved vaccines in the U.S. has dropped dramatically, while protection against severe illness has persisted.
Mount Sinai reports that interim results from a placebo-controlled, phase 1/2 study of the technology in Thailand found that the nasal vaccine induced higher neutralizing antibodies against the Wuhan strain than the available COVID-19 shots in the U.S.
Interim results of a booster study of the nasal spray conducted at Mount Sinai are expected in the fourth quarter, according to CastleVax CEO Matt Stober. The vaccine technology has been transferred to manufacturers in Brazil, Mexico, Vietnam and Thailand, which together could produce more than a billion doses a year.
CastleVax also has contingency plans should humans develop immunogenicity to the benign NDV virus In that event, the company would replace the NDV glycoproteins in the vaccine with ones from other members of the avian paramyxovirus family.
Given the tantalizing—albeit early—data on the intranasal vaccine and the manufacturing capabilities, the potential public health and global equity benefits are clear. But recent history would also suggest there’s an economic upside. Most notably, Moderna and BioNTech both ascended last year from budding biotechs to top 20 pharma off the back of their own vaccine platforms and COVID-19 jabs.
“COVID-19 is the first step for our platform development,” said Stober in a release. “We aim to engineer vaccines to fight a broad range of future respiratory pandemic threats that experts in the field foresee as inevitable.”