COVID-19 boosters could potentially be administered with a nasal spray instead of a needle in the future, as a way to boost antibodies in the airway, lungs and nose.
The benefits of this method boil down to two main areas, one is that since it doesn’t involve needles or syringes, people are more likely to get the booster administered if they have a needle phobia.
Secondly, there are different types of antibodies throughout the body. The ones located on mucosal surfaces in the body, like the mouth, nose, and lungs, are not generated when the dose is administered through a shot into the muscle.
"Those antibodies are really important," said Dr. Amesh Adalja, Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, on KCBS Radio's "Ask an Expert" on Thursday with Holly Quan and Dan Mitchinson.
While the current vaccines are really good at preventing hospitalization and severe illness, they are not as effective at preventing infection altogether. The antibodies in the mucosal surfaces of the body are very important to preventing infection, he said, and the current vaccines don’t generate them.
The new method would "improve our vaccines and really cut down on infection rates," said Adalja.
But it's still too early in the research phase to know for sure how effective this new form might be, he said. As of right now, there is only one type of nasal vaccine, for the flu, and while it seems to work well in children, it doesn't provide much protection in adults.
In that case, antibodies from previous vaccines and flu illnesses can block the spray. But the flu nasal vaccine is different, it uses the virus, while the potential COVID-19 spray doesn’t use the whole virus, only one specific protein.
"We may have a much better experience with COVID-19 vaccines through the nasal route than we had with the flu," he said.
It would still take about two weeks for the immunity response to kick in with the new version, said Adalja.
It might only be a matter of months, in some countries sooner than the United States, for these types of vaccines to become available.
The FDA moves a bit slower to approve things than regulatory agencies. "There's a bit more of a difficulty in the US regulatory process than there are in other countries," he said.
The process needs to move faster and be streamlined in order to get ahead of the pandemic and manage it into the endemic phase, said Adalja.
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