NanoViricides Says Data Shows Its New Antiviral Could Fight all COVID-19 Variants

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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.

NanoViricides Inc. NNVC is a nanomedicine technology company that has been developing antiviral therapies for a range of viruses, including the flu, rabies, herpes, HIV, and many more pervasive viral infections. Most recently, the company has been researching the potential for adapting its pioneering NanoViricide platform to target COVID-19 and its continuously evolving variants.

Last month, the company reported a breakthrough in that research. According to its team, pre-clinical studies  of the orally administered NV-CoV-2, its leading drug candidate in the fight against COVID-19, showed that it effectively suppressed infections by SARS-CoV-2 and 2 other coronaviruses, all very different from each other.

A Closer Look at the Research

The latest results come from cell culture studies. According to NanoViricides, researchers compared the drug candidate NV-CoV-2 to a control antibody that also targets SARS-CoV-2 antigens. Each of those was then compared to infected cells that received neither the drug candidate nor the control antibody. The drug candidate and the control were each added to a SARS-CoV-pseudovirion assay separately to measure their ability to stop infection. 

A pseudovirus is basically a lab-engineered replica of a virus that’s designed so that it cannot  reproduce to prevent the risk of unintentional viral outbreaks. Pseudoviruses have become a standard tool in the race to develop drugs and vaccines that can stop COVID-19. 

Once the pseudovirion assays were ready, researchers divided a set of cell cultures into 3 groups. One group in the assay received the drug candidate. Another received the control antibody. The 3rd group received neither treatment. 

Of the 3 groups, the groups with both the drug candidate NV-CoV-2 and the antibody showed significantly reduced viral infection, as compared to the untreated group. A different cell culture method that actually evaluates the drug’s ability to limit  the overall infection and replication of the virus was followed to test the drug candidate’s effectiveness against other coronaviruses, including human coronavirus NL63 and 229E. 

“These results imply that the drug will remain active in spite of novel variants of SARS-CoV-2 evolution in the field and indeed demonstrate the pan-coronavirus activity of our clinical drug candidate NV-CoV-2,” the company announced in its press release about the pre-clinical results.

Essentially, the results have made the company optimistic that NV-CoV-2 could be a broad-spectrum antiviral that would effectively treat all variants of COVID-19 and potentially any new mutations that evolve later on.

What’s Next for NanoViricides’s Broad Spectrum COVID-19 Treatment?

With cell study and animal study data demonstrating that its drug candidate is both effective and well-tolerated, NanoViricides says the next step is a human clinical trial to confirm the results seen in the earlier studies — and the research team is already preparing for that phase.

"We are now preparing submission documents to enable initiation of human clinical trials," Anil Diwan, chairman, and president of the company said. "We believe that NV-CoV-2 may help end the pandemic if it is shown to be effective in human clinical trials."

Because of the large-scale efforts to develop treatments and vaccines against COVID-19 — including by big pharma entities like Pfizer Inc. PFE and  Merck & Co., Inc. MRK —  competition for the limited supply of clinical sites is fierce. The resulting delays mean NanoViricides does not yet have a timeline for when the next phase of research can begin. 

As the company continues to look for clinical sites inside the United States, the team is also pursuing options elsewhere in order to continue research and move this potential broad-spectrum COVID-19 treatment toward the market as soon as possible.

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.