The University of Waterloo has announced that School of Pharmacy faculty members Roderick Slavcev and Emmanuel Ho are collaborating with Chemical Engineering professor Marc Aucoin on development of an intranasal vaccine against COVID-19. According to the announcement, Slavcev is modifying his group’s existing bacteriophage vaccine technology for the COVID-19 vaccine and Ho’s team will create the intranasal nanoformulation.
Slavcev commented, “When complete, our DNA-based vaccine will be administered non-invasively as a nasal spray that delivers nanomedicine engineered to immunize and decrease COVID-19 infections. This research combines the expertise of many and leverages existing technology developed by my team, which we’re reconfiguring for a COVID-19 application.”
He added, “It is the collaborative effort of our talented teams that makes this multidisciplinary project so feasible and necessarily efficient as a potential universal vaccine solution against SARS-CoV infections. To practice science with such urgency alongside such talented colleagues and their students is not only immensely educational, it is extremely rewarding.”
Read the University of Waterloo press release.
