StaniPharm has manufactured clinical batches of Muco-Excipient for Lovaltech’s intranasal vaccine, as the MUCOBOOST clinical trial gets underway
On 14 March 2025, Lovaltech, a Tours-based biotech start-up, announced the launch of MUCOBOOST, the First-in-Human clinical trial for its intranasal COVID-19 vaccine candidate. The trial is co-sponsored by Tours University Hospital (CHRU de Tours) and ANRS – Emerging Infectious Diseases (ANRS MIE).
Unlike current intramuscular vaccines, which rely on systemic immunity, Lovaltech’s candidate is administered as a nasal spray. It is designed to trigger both a systemic and a local immune response directly at the respiratory mucosa — the virus’s main point of entry — with the goal of blocking infection and reducing transmission between individuals.
The Phase I/II randomized, controlled trial began enrolling healthy adult volunteers in April 2025 at the Clinical Investigation Centre of CHRU de Tours, followed in June by the CIC Cochin-Pasteur in Paris. Phase I, a dose-escalation study involving 36 volunteers, is expected to yield preliminary results in autumn 2025, ahead of a planned 202-volunteer Phase II across five centres of the I-Reivac network in early 2026.
“We are proud to have contributed to the development of Lovaltech’s intranasal vaccine platform. Formulating a stable, GMP-compliant muco-excipient for nasal delivery is exactly the kind of technical challenge our nanoformulation expertise was built for, and seeing it advance to clinical trials is a strong validation of that work,”
