Developing a variety of preventative measures and therapies that can target different stages of exposure and infection is key, said Gilly Regev, Israeli co-founder and CEO of SaNOtize, a Vancouver-based startup that has developed a nasal spray that kills COVID-19 and other infections.
“There won’t be one treatment,” Regev said. “It will be a combination of a few different treatments, and vaccines will be some of them. But it’s not necessarily just a vaccine.”
Clinical trials are now underway in Canada to confirm the safety of SaNOtize’s nitric oxide-based NORS spray, which aims to kill the virus in the nose before it spreads to the rest of the respiratory tract. Proven to kill 99.9% of the virus in independent lab tests, the spray was developed as a preventative measure, similar to hand sanitizer, to kill germs before they enter a person’s body, Regev explained.
“The virus multiplies in the nose, and if we can kill the virus at that point, before it becomes a full-blown infection, then we cure the disease,” she said.
The spray is easy to use and could also be effective against mutated forms of the novel coronavirus, a growing concern for scientists, she said.
“It’s not specific to this specific virus,” Regev said, explaining that naturally occurring nitric oxide has been shown effective against influenza, as well as other viruses, bacteria and fungi in lab studies. “If the virus mutates or changes, this will still work.”
Regev hopes it will be on the market as a preventative in mid-2021 if it passes the trials in Canada and elsewhere.
The company is also carrying out a trial to test if the spray can be an early treatment for people infected with the coronavirus.
“But finding those people early on in the disease is challenging,” she said, explaining that many people don’t realize they have the virus until they have been sick for many days.
The difficulty of finding early-stage patients is a main reason so many treatments under development have focused on hospitalized patients, who are already at the severe and later stages of the disease, she said.
