Can a nose-full of chicken antibodies ward off coronavirus infections?

Can a nose-full of chicken antibodies ward off coronavirus infections? A novel project aims to temporarily protect humans from COVID-19 with a nasal spray Science | AAAS

While the world waits for a widely available, safe, and effective COVID-19 vaccine, scientists are becoming ever more creative in their search for other ways to protect people from the disease. Now, a clinical trial has begun in Australia to find out whether nasal drops that contain chicken antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 can offer temporary protection.

The Stanford University team that’s sponsoring the unusual phase I study hopes the antibodies can safeguard people at increased risk of infection for several hours. If the idea pans out—and there are no animal data yet showing it can work—people could sniff the nasal drops before getting on a plane, working in a crowded space, entering a college dormitory, or joining a family get together. “There is a huge opportunity,” says Daria Mochly-Rosen, the Stanford protein chemist spearheading the project.

Other protective nasal sprays are in development, but the Stanford approach is unusually low-tech, relying on antibodies harvested from egg yolks of chickens immunized with spike, the surface protein of SARS-CoV-2. The trial will assess the safety of those antibodies given intranasally and how long they persist in the nose. The research team also plans to test whether the antibody-laden nasal drops protect hamsters deliberately exposed to the coronavirus.

“The concept, in principle, sort of makes sense,” says Michael Diamond, an infectious disease clinician at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who is developing a nasal-administered vaccine for COVID-19. “But there are a couple of issues to think about.” One is how long the chicken antibodies will last before they degrade, he says, and the other is whether humans will develop an immune response against them.

Mochly-Rosen is confident the antibodies will pass those tests, but says, “The proof is in the pudding”—the placebo-controlled safety trial now taking place in 48 people in Australia....

The idea came from a Spark director in Australia, Michael Wallach at the University of Technology Sydney, who has made vaccines to protect chickens from disease and has tested chicken antibodies in a mouse influenza model. ...