Are Pfizer, Moderna, J&J Booster Shots a Panacea? This Company Says Its Broad-Spectrum Drugs to Fight COVID-19 Would Help End the Pandemic

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The following post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga.

The inventor of one of the technologies being used to fight COVID-19 has cast doubts on the efficacy of administering booster shots to help shore up protection against the deadly virus.

Dr. Anil R. Diwan, president and chairman of NanoViricides, Inc. NNVC, believes that the booster jabs are iffy and not the best solution to curbing the deadly virus as new variants keep rearing their heads.

The warning is coming as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved booster shots of Pfizer Inc PFE Moderna Inc. MRNA and Johnson & Johnson Co. JNJ COVID-19 vaccines.

The approval will enable booster doses to be administered to most adults who have been fully vaccinated in the United States. More than 15 million people have been inoculated with the J&J vaccine, while over 69 million people have been fully vaccinated with 2 doses of Moderna’s vaccine.

The FDA said it had approved the booster shots of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine for recipients aged 65 and older as well as other vulnerable groups, while the booster dose of the J&J single-shot COVID-19 vaccine is for adults aged 18 and older.

The regulatory agency authorized the use of heterologous (mix and match) booster doses for currently available COVID-19 vaccines. The FDA, in September, had approved the Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE)/BioNTech SE (NASDAQ: BNTX) booster vaccine for seniors and adults at high risk of COVID-19.

Booster Shots Not a Panacea?

So far, only 5% of Americans have received booster shots. More seem to be uncertain or confused about the booster shots.

Countries are still counting their losses from the pandemic. Out of 243 million reported cases, the deadly virus has claimed more than 4.95 million lives globally. The U.S. has recorded 45.4 million cases with about 736,000 deaths.

The world has been racing to find an effective treatment to save lives and stop the spread of the virus. But while Dr. Diwan has lauded the current mass rollout of vaccines globally, he believes it is not the solution to COVID-19.

Anil R Diwan, Ph.D., president and chairman of NanoViricides, Inc. 

Speaking at the Benzinga Small Cap Conference, Diwan said, “what is going on is that it’s costing economies trillions of dollars. There is no end in sight despite vaccines because variants are fueling new waves and every time there is a variant, it has escaped someway against the existing drugs — mainly the antibodies and the vaccines and so we are currently at the stage called ‘fighting a constant battle.’”

Sharing his thoughts on booster shots, the inventor of novel polymeric micelle-based nanomedicine technologies in 1991, warned they “are not going to be the panacea. There are a lot of scientific reasons why that is kind of an iffy approach to use.”

NanoViricides’ Potential Solution

NanoViricides stated that it made a significant announcement on Oct. 11, 2021, regarding its coronavirus drug candidates.

The Company revealed that its Pan-Coronavirus COVID-19 Drug Candidate NV-CoV-2 was found to be effective against SARS-CoV-2 in a standard cell culture pseudovirion assay, demonstrating that the drug has broad-spectrum pan-coronavirus activity.

Pan-coronavirus activity implies that the drug NV-CoV-2 should remain active in spite of the evolution of variants of SARS-CoV-2 in the field, a highly sought-after characteristic to combat the current global pandemic.

Both the drug candidate NV-CoV-2 and a positive control antibody specific to the Spike antigen S1 of the SARS-CoV-2 virus suppressed the infection by the SARS-CoV-2-pseudovirions in cell culture studies to virtually the same baseline levels.

The Company said it has now demonstrated that NV-CoV-2 is highly effective in cell cultures against SARS-CoV-2, human coronavirus NL-63, and human coronavirus 229E, all very different human coronaviruses.

These results imply that the drug will remain active in spite of novel variants of SARS-CoV-2 evolution. 

Unique, Novel, Post-ImmunoTherapeutic "Bind-Encapsulate-Destroy" Mechanism 

Additionally, the pseudovirion study also showed that NV-CoV-2 neutralizes the virus particles themselves outside of the cells, validating NanoViricides’ design mechanism.

“We are now preparing submission documents to enable initiation of human clinical trials,” Dr. Diwan said. “We believe that NV-CoV-2 may help end the pandemic if it is shown to be effective in human clinical trials.”

NanoViricides currently has 2 drug candidates, NV-CoV-2 and NV-CoV-2-R, in development to enter clinical trials. It says that both possess broad-spectrum activities against many coronaviruses.

The Company’s animal model studies indicate that both NV-CoV-2 and NV-CoV-2-R are substantially superior to Remdesivir in controlling coronavirus lethal lung infection.

Read more about NanoViricides, Inc., here.

The preceding post was written and/or published as a collaboration between Benzinga’s in-house sponsored content team and a financial partner of Benzinga. Although the piece is not and should not be construed as editorial content, the sponsored content team works to ensure that any and all information contained within is true and accurate to the best of their knowledge and research. This content is for informational purposes only and not intended to be investing advice.