New York City-based Mount Sinai Health System is launching CastleVax, its own vaccine company, to meet "future pandemic threats," according to an Aug. 9 press release.
With CastleVax, the health system said it plans to evaluate its vaccine platform technology developed from Newcastle disease virus, which birds can contract but is harmless to people. The company is currently testing a potential COVID-19 nasal vaccine in an early trial and will embark on an omicron-targeted vaccine candidate, which other vaccine-makers are racing to distribute this fall.
"COVID-19 is the first step for our platform development," Matt Stober, CastleVax president and CEO, said in a statement. "We aim to engineer vaccines to fight a broad range of future respiratory pandemic threats that experts in the field foresee as inevitable."