CanSino Biologics Inc.’s shares rose 14.5% Monday morning in Hong Kong after China approved the needle-free, inhaled version of its Covid-19 vaccine.
CanSino’s Ad5-nCoV has been approved for emergency use as a booster vaccine by China’s National Medical Products Administration, the company said on Sunday. As of February 2021, CanSino has been using the vaccine in China, Mexico, Pakistan, Malaysia, Hungary, where it is the first one-shot Covid vaccine in the world to have undergone human testing. With the inhaled version, CanSino said, protection can be boosted without intramuscular injection due to the stimulation of cellular immunity and mucosal immunity. Coronavirus vaccines are being developed for inhalation to stimulate antibodies in nasal and airway tissues.
Vaccines can be self-administered and are needle-free, so they may be appealing to people who are hesitant to get vaccines and may ease health-care resources’ burdens. One-shot vaccines developed by Sinovac Biotech Ltd. and Sinopharm Group Co. in China are more effective than CanSino’s one-shot vaccine when preventing Covid-19 symptoms and 91% against severe disease. Chinese companies have sent 770 million doses to the rest of the world through those two companies. Similar to vaccines developed by AstraZeneca Plc and Johnson & Johnson, the vaccine is based on a modified cold-causing virus.
