Aiming to make Covid vaccines easier to take, East Bay company pushes forward with microneedle patch

Excerpt from the Press Release:

An East Bay company formulated a Covid-19 vaccine candidate to load onto a patch of 2,000 microneedles, one of several efforts globally to make it easier to take drugs and vaccines to combat the pandemic.

Zosano Pharma Corp. (NASDAQ: ZSAN) of Fremont did not disclose the name of the vaccine, obtained from a vaccine developer, or a timeline for taking the patch into clinical trials in humans.

But the company’s aim is clear: to make it easier to get vaccines into more people’s arms, especially under the risk of new variants emerging from a virus that has infected nearly 255 million people and killed more than 5.1 million people worldwide. Instead of an intramuscular injection, Zosano’s adhesive patch with a reusable applicator would prick the skin with the drug-coated titanium microneedles and would be stable at room temperature, the company said.

Other companies are looking at ways of getting drugs and vaccines to Covid patients or people at risk of contracting the virus earlier and with greater ease of use. A handful of companies are looking at intranasal delivery of a vaccine, including Meissa Vaccines of Redwood City, or an oral vaccine, like the one being worked on by South San Francisco’s Vaxart Inc. (NASDAQ: VXRT) or inhaled treatments, like one under development by Inhalon Biopharma Inc., which last month enrolled its first patient in an early-stage safety study.

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