Altimmune announced this week that its intranasal vaccine for COVID-19 failed to hit the mark in a Phase 1 clinical trial.
In a statement, the Maryland-based clinical stage company said that its vaccine was well tolerated by the 80 healthy adults in the early trial, but that the “immunogenicity data demonstrated lower than expected immune responses in each of the immune parameters tested.”
The company did not disclose exact estimates of the vaccine’s effectiveness in its statement about the top-line results. However, Altimmune said that even though the product, AdCOVID, did generate antibodies, “the magnitude of the response and the percent of subjects responding to AdCOVID were substantially lower than what has been demonstrated for other vaccines already authorized for emergency use.”
“The top-line Phase 1 clinical data are disappointing given the encouraging preclinical data and our substantial efforts in advancing a differentiated, intranasal vaccine candidate in the fight against COVID-19,” Vipin K. Garg, president and CEO at Altimmune, said in a statement. “However, we are fortunate to have a strong pipeline with highly differentiated product candidates targeting indications of significant unmet need. Moving forward, Altimmune will focus its resources on the development of ALT-801 and HepTcell, its novel peptide-based therapeutics for obesity and liver diseases.”
