Zentek Ltd. announced successful testing of its COVID-19 High-Binding Affinity (C19HBA) aptamer against the Omicron XBB 1.5 variant (Omicron) by the Miller Lab at McMaster University in the latest pre-clinical study. The performance of the C19HBA aptamer was comparable to the performance of monoclonal antibody, according to the Miller Lab, as it once again provided clinical protection against infection with the Omicron XBB1.5 variant. This is a significant result given that aptamers have the potential to replace or compete with monoclonal antibodies in many therapies due to their advantages including cost of production, stability, and speed of development.

The Company will now begin to explore partnership opportunities in the pharmaceutical space as its aptamer platform may offer a fast, economical, and novel approach to the development of new therapeutics for clinically relevant biological markers. Moreover, the platform technology can simply be added to existing aptamers already in development and bring significant value by substantially increasing the effectiveness of the aptamers or drug while reducing or eliminating the problem of renal filtration. Currently to evade renal filtration, aptamer therapeutics add polyethylene glycol (PEG), but there is a small percentage of the population that is allergic to PEG.

Aptamer therapeutics with PEG have failed in clinical trials previously because of this allergic response. HBA aptamers may solve the renal clearance challenge without the need for PEG and this potential risk to some patients. The animal model that was used to assess the C19HBA aptamers for the Omicron variant XBB 1.5, is very susceptible to severe infection.

The mice were engineered to have the same ACE2 receptors as humans which makes them very susceptible to COVID-19 infection and allows the disease to progress rapidly. If the treatment was ineffective, the animals would have quickly deteriorated from this dose, as was observed with untreated animals. In this study, engineered mice that have the same ACE2 receptor as humans were used for the trial.

The mice were divided into three different groups - he first group was a control, while the second received the monoclonal antibody and the third received the C19HBA aptAMers two hours prior to lethal Omicron infection. The control group demonstrated obvious signs of severe illness within five days of the infection. All animals that received monoclonal antibody or HBA aptamer survived.

The HBA aptamer group had a slight weight loss during the initial phase of the trial but regained their original weight by the end of the seven-day study. Any groups interested in learning more about the high binding affinity aptamer platform or the results of this SARS-CoV-2 study are encouraged to reach out to Colin van der Kuur, Chief Science Officer at Zentek at.