Oxford team looking at possibility of creating vaccine pill, MPs told24 Feb 2021 14:40
From the Graun:
Back in the science committee Prof Sarah Gilbert, head of the team that produced the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, said that in future the Covid vaccine could be administered in the form of a pill.
She said that her team was already beginning to look at the possibility of this, and that it would make delivering future doses of vaccine much easier.
She also suggested the vaccine could be delivered by nasal spray in future.
In response to a question from Labour’s Graham Stringer about how the vaccine might be developed in the future, she said.
We are also thinking about second generation formulations of vaccine. As you know all the vaccines have been given at the moment as intramuscular injections. That is not necessarily the best way to provide protection against a respiratory virus infection, where we want to the immune system to be active in the upper respiratory tract and then in the lower spiritual tract, which is where the virus is causing the infection.
And we have flu vaccines that are given by nasal spray. And this could be a very good approach in the future to use vaccines against coronaviruses.
It’s also possible to consider oral vaccination where you take a tablet that will give you the immunisation, and that would have a lot of benefits for vaccine rollout, if you didn’t have to use the needles and syringes for people.
Both of those approaches which we are beginning to assess. They will take time to develop. They will have to be tested to safety, and then for efficacy as well because the immune responses that will be generated by both of those approaches will be a little bit different to what we get from an intramuscular injection.
But they have potentially large advantages, and so that’s where we’re going to be focusing our attention on working out if we could use different delivery rates in the future for these vaccines.
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