Oragenics Extends Collaboration To Develop Vaccines Against Future Variants of Coronaviruses

UF startup and UF Innovate | Sid Martin Biotech graduate Oragenics, Inc. announced it has extended a licensing and collaboration agreement with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) that enables Oragenics to pursue an intranasal vaccine designed to protect against future variants of coronaviruses. The NRC cell expression technologies provide Oragenics with a platform that can generate cell lines for high-yield production of spike protein antigens for existing and emerging variants of concern. This platform could allow production of cell lines within six to eight weeks of spike gene sequence availability, compared with six to nine months for traditional production of such cell lines. The NRC technologies, developed with support from the NRC’s Pandemic Response Challenge program, will expedite the evaluation of future intranasal vaccine candidates in preclinical and clinical studies.