Alongside AuraVax Therapeutics Inc. UH is developing a vaccine towards immunity to diseases such as COVID-19.
AuraVax is a Houston-based biotech company with UH chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Navin Varadarajan as a co-founder.
The technology being developed between both UH and AuraVax is a nasal inhalant vaccine, where ABC13 compared the technology to FluMist.
According to UH, Varadarajan said the technology will hold systematic immunity based on pre-clinical experimentation.
The vaccine technology is using spike proteins to help the virus enter the target cell and neutralize antibodies.
“We plan to stop COVID-19, a respiratory virus, at its point of entry — the nasal cavity — and we believe our intranasal platform is a differentiated approach that will lead to a vaccine with increased efficacy to create sustained immunity to COVID-19,” said Varadarajan to UH.
