John Lewis, co-founder and chief scientific officer at Seattle’s OncoSenX, and co-founder and CEO of Entos Pharmaceuticals in Edmonton, Alberta. (LinkedIn Photo)

A researcher with ties to Seattle-based biotech company OncoSenX has received a $4.2 million grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for work on a COVID-19 vaccine.

John Lewis, OncoSenX’s co-founder and chief scientific officer, is working on a DNA-based vaccine against COVID. The grant will pay for research to test candidate vaccines on animals and in human clinical trials. The research will be done at Entos Pharmaceuticals in Edmonton, Alberta, where Lewis is a co-founder and CEO.

The vaccine uses a technology called Fusogenix to deliver the DNA into target cells. The researchers said they have selected the two most promising DNA sequences for further testing.

Researchers at OncoSenX are using Fusogenix for cancer research on the treatment of solid tumors. OncoSenX is the spinoff of a third company, Seattle-based Oisin Biotechnologies. Oisin last month announced that it had raised $2 million in seed round funding for its work deploying Fusogenix to treat age-related disease.

The clinical trials at Entos will be the first chance to test the technology in humans.

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