DIOS-CoVax - A vaccine designed to protect against COVID-19 and future Coronavirus epidemics, mitigating antibody enhanced disease.

Safe and highly effective vaccines are the most promising medical interventions for the prevention of infectious diseases. At the time of writing, there have been over 5 million cases and 330,000 deaths reported to the WHO. The coronavirus, referred to as SARS-CoV-2, causes a respiratory disease termed COVID-19\. Current experimental Spike-based coronavirus vaccines have limited efficacy in animals tested with the experimental vaccine, and there remains concerns about longer-term immunopathology. Animals given experimental SARS vaccines suffered more serious lung disease when challenged with coronavirus than unvaccinated animals who were infected with coronavirus, meaning human trials and vaccine development were impossible. Our study uses innovative technologies to avoid these problems by selecting modified coronavirus antigens that will be incorporated in the vaccine and will trigger the human immune system to produce the important and focussed antibody responses that we need to protect us against the virus. This proposal will take this new vaccine through the manufacturing and safety testing phases to a completed first in human phase 1 trial. Of note, the DNA vaccine does not require a cold-chain and can be administered without a needle, relatively pain-free, allowing highly efficient mass vaccination strategies to be rapidly deployed.