On Tuesday January 12th, in Nature Communications, strong preclinical results for a new COVID-19 vaccine, developed by the team of Prof. Salanti from University of Copenhagen, ExpreS2ion Biotech, its joint venture partner AdaptVac and the PREVENT-nCoV consortium, was published. Based on these results, a clinical trial application (CTA) for a clinical Phase I/II study for the COVID-19 vaccine has been submitted.

About the preclinical results

Readouts from the data show that ABNCoV2 has the potential to be the best-in-class COVID-19 vaccine with a more than 100-fold higher level of neutralizing antibodies compared with published preclinical animal data from currently approved COVID-19 vaccines, such as Pfizer-BioNTech's, Moderna’s, and AstraZeneca-Oxford's vaccines. The full paper is available online.

About the CTA

The Clinical trial application (CTA) for the ABNCoV2 capsid virus-like particle (cVLP) based COVID-19 vaccine was submitted to the Central Committee on Research Involving Human Subjects (CCMO) in the Netherlands last week. It is expected to be approved under a COVID-19 fast-track review progress. This can be seen as another significant milestone following the November 2020 announcement of the successful GMP manufacturing of the vaccine. ExpreS2ion expects to present preliminary clinical Phase I/IIa results before end of Q1 2021.

Attana’s involvement

Since March 2020, Attana has been assisting the team of Prof. Ali Salanti at the University of Copenhagen in the development of this COVID-19 vaccine with two of Attana’s QCM Biosensors combined with research intelligence. As can be seen in the paper published, Attana’s technology has foremost been used to analyze kinetic interactions between RBD antigens and CLP-RBD to hACE2. Furthermore, Attana and ExpreS2ion recently established a strategic partnership including a supply agreement of proteins. In addition, Attana technology has been used to quality control the vaccine for the IND submission.

Attana CEO Teodor Aastrup comments:

“I’m thrilled for our partners sake and for the future of vaccine development and wish to congratulate all parties involved for achieving such exciting results. I’m now looking forward to explore this collaboration further and to hopefully work more closely with both Prof. Salanti and the team at ExpreS2ion in the near time future.”

About Attana

Attana was founded in 2002 with the vision of in-vitro characterization of molecular interactions mimicking in-vivo conditions. Since then, Attana has developed proprietary label free biosensors for biochemical, crude, sera, and cell-based assays and the Attana Virus Analytics (AVA) platform, a proprietary in-vitro diagnostics (IVD) tool. Attana products and research services are used by Big Pharma, biotech companies and academic institutions within the life sciences.

Read the full Paper