OREANDA-NEWS. Israel became the first country in the world to create an innovative vaccine against COVID-19 in an unusual form - in the form of capsules. Now manufacturers are going to conduct clinical trials of a new drug. This is reported by The Jerusalem Post, based on the official information of the pharmaceutical company Oramed Pharmaceuticals.

It is reported that testing will be carried out at the Sourasky Medical Center immediately after the new drug receives approval from the country's Ministry of Health. This will take about a few weeks. The drug testing will involve 24 volunteers who have not yet been vaccinated with any other vaccine. Half of the group of volunteers will be given one capsule, while the rest of the subjects will receive two doses of the drug at once. The drug testing will take six weeks in total.

Nadav Kidron, CEO of manufacturing company Oramed Pharmaceuticals, listed several benefits of the new oral vaccine. According to him, the capsule vaccine is "more resistant to different strains of coronavirus," because, unlike the drugs Moderna and Pfizer, it affects the three structural proteins of the virus. Another advantage of the drug is fewer side effects, as opposed to injections.

It is important that the encapsulated vaccine is easy to transport anywhere in the world, because it does not require special storage conditions. According to the director, the new drug can be transported at standard refrigerator temperatures, and the drug can be stored at all at room temperature. The developer hopes that in the future, these conditions will give people the opportunity to take the vaccine not in the hospital, but at home, on their own.

The developer added that it will seek approval of the vaccine in other countries if the trials of the new drug are successful. He is sure that the population of the countries of South America needs such drugs more than others.

Prior to this, the director of the World Health Organization (WHO) Tedros Adan Ghebreyesus said that along with the speed and scale of the spread of coronavirus infection, more and more dangerous variants of it appear, which can become even more destructive than the rapidly spreading "delta" today. He noted that as the number of variants increases, the chance that one of them will be able to dodge vaccines increases.