US Government plans to fund next generation Covid-19 vaccines

Tomorrow, Tuesday July 26th, top officials in the Biden administration are meeting with executives and scientists from large pharmaceutical companies. Their goal: Figuring out how to make better Covid-19 vaccines.

“These are vaccines that are going to be far more durable, that are going to provide far longer-lasting protection, no matter what the virus does or how it evolves,” Ashish Jha, the White House Covid-19 response coordinator, said. “If we can drive down infections by 90% … Covid really begins to fade into the background, and becomes just one more respiratory illness that we have to deal with.”

While Stat News is reporting that Moderna and Pfizer will be at the meeting, it doesn’t mention BioNTech. Which is strange, because BioNTech has been working with Matinas BioPharma for 105 days on exactly this problem.

BNTX and MTNB have entered into an exclusivity agreement to explore the use of Matinas’ LNC technology with BioNTech’s mRNA vaccines. A full licensing agreement is being negotiated and could be announced any day.

If you’re unfamiliar with LNC, it stands for lipid nano-crystals. It’s a drug delivery system, which appears to be significantly better than LNPs (lipid nano particles) which the mRNA vaccines are using today.

An LNC Covid-19 vaccine wouldn’t need crazy refrigeration. They can be stored on a shelf for months. This would make getting vaccines to developing countries a lot easier.

An LNC Covid-19 vaccine could be administered orally. A pill instead of a syringe. This is huge for numerous reasons.

1. You’d need less nurses so you can hand out the vaccine faster.

2. People are less afraid of pills than needles, so uptake will be higher. (2 in 3 kids are afraid of needles. As many as 1 in 4 adults are as well.)

3. No more needles means no more syringe shortages.

4. It could theoretically be shipped right to a person’s home.

Those are great reasons that an LNC Covid-19 vaccine would blow the existing vaccine out of the water, but the benefits don’t stop there.

LNC was designed to allow drugs to be more effective and less toxic. If BioNTech and Matinas are successful, we’re looking at a potential best-in-class Covid-19 vaccine.

“When we have a whole new platform of vaccines, I expect a vast majority of Americans to take it,” Jha said.

The White House is meeting scientists tomorrow, but BioNTech is way ahead of them. Hopefully BioNTech get an invite. Or maybe they’re just busy in the lab and sent their partner, Pfizer, to do the talking.

Either way, if the Biden administration wants a roadmap to a better Covid-19 vaccine, BioNTech and Matinas have it planned out. They’ve already got 105 days of pre-clinical work done.

“We have fantastic vaccines that are actually doing a lot of good right now and are quite safe,” Jha said. “And so the bar for approving new vaccines is going to be that it has to be better than that. And that’s going to be a high bar.”

While BioNTech is working on revolutionizing the delivery of mRNA, Moderna is currently being used for violating patents related to lipid nano particles. Moderna doesn’t have a chance in hell at competing with BioNTech in this round of Covid vaccines.

Who knows, maybe BNTX and MTNB will announce their licensing agreement tomorrow morning before the meeting at the White House. Wouldn’t that be neat.

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