New Delhi: The clinical trial of Bharat Biotech's nasal covid vaccine will be held at Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS) soon. According to a report in ANI, the trial of this nasal vaccine is expected to commence in the next couple of weeks. The approval for this clinical trial has been sent to seek the mandatory permission of the AIIMS Ethics Committee.

Bharat Biotech's intranasal vaccine received regulatory approval for second Phase trials in August.

Here is all you need to know about Bharat Biotech's nasal covid vaccine

1) The adenoviral intranasal vaccine BBV154 is the first of its kind Covid-19 vaccine to undergo human trials in India.

2) After getting the ethics committee's nod, the second phase of the trials will be conducted on volunteers who will be administered the two doses of the vaccine with a gap of four weeks in between.

3) According to the ministry of science and technology, the Phase 1 trial in healthy volunteers of age groups ranging from 18-60 years was well tolerated.

4) Trials for the Phase 3 trial will commence after the completion of Phase-2 clinical trials.

5) Bharat Biotech's nasal vaccine clinical trial's principal investigator will be Dr Sanjay Rai.

Nasal vaccine may be more effective

The intramuscular injection produces antibodies that circulate in the blood to recognize the virus. But this route of administration doesn’t necessarily produce antibodies in the nose and nasal passages.

This has raised the possibility that vaccinated people could still catch and spread the virus, even when they don’t know they’re infected. Scientists have proposed that vaccines are given through the nose (intranasally) may be able to block SARS-CoV-2 in both the nasal passages and bloodstream.

Researchers led by Dr Vincent Munster from NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) tested intranasal delivery of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine in hamsters and monkeys. A nasal spray of the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine protected hamsters and monkeys against serious disease and reduced the amount of virus in the nose.