Press release
Arcturus Therapeutics Announces Preclinical Publication of its COVID-19 Vaccine Candidate
Encouraging preclinical results demonstrate a strong antibody and cellular immune response and 100% protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection following a single
About this update from Arcturus Therapeutics Holdings Inc.
[{"type":"text","content":"Encouraging preclinical results demonstrate a strong antibody and cellular immune response and 100% protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection following a single vaccination\n Clinical study remains on track, initial data readout expected Q4 2020 SAN DIEGO, Sept. 04, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Arcturus Therapeutics Holdings Inc. (the “Company”, “Arcturus”, Nasdaq: ARCT), a leading clinical-stage messenger RNA medicines company focused on the development of infectious disease vaccines and significant opportunities within liver and respiratory rare diseases, today announced that its manuscript is now available on an online preprint server at Bioarchive and is concurrently undergoing scientific peer review. The manuscript provides an in-depth assessment of humoral- and cell-mediated immune activation following a single shot vaccination in mice and shows that LUNAR®-COV19 (ARCT-021) produced robust antibody responses, with neutralizing antibody titers increasing up to day 60. In addition, single doses of LUNAR®-COV19 at both the 2 μg and 10 μg levels completely protected human ACE2 transgenic mice from both mortality and even measurable infection following wild-type SARS-CoV-2 challenge. The Company believes that the findings from this study, which was conducted in collaboration with Duke-NUS Medical School, collectively suggest the potential of LUNAR®-COV19 as a single dose vaccine. The Company is currently evaluating LUNAR®-COV19 in a Phase 1/2 clinical study. The publication: de Alwis et al., A Single Prime Self-Transcribing and Replicating RNA Based SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination Produces Protective Adaptive Immunity is available on the Bioarchive website https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.03.280446v1 “The data we have in preprint at Bioarchive continues to provide strong support for the potent immunogenicity of LUNAR®-COV19. Results demonstrate that a single vaccination in mice led to robust antibody responses, with neutralizing antibody titers increasing up to day 60. Furthermore, activation of cell mediated immunity produced a strong viral antigen specific CD8+ T lymphocyte response and a desirable Th1 dominant immune response. Importantly, a single LUNAR®-COV19 vaccination at very low microgram doses resulted in complete protection from infection and death from SARS-CoV-2 in a transgenic human ACE2 mouse challenge model, wit...