Koenraad Wiedhaup (file photo)

GV wa­gers on sea­soned team's in­tranasal 'tem­po­rary' pre­ven­ta­tive ap­proach to virus­es — with ex-Gilead CEO John Mar­tin jump­ing on board

Last May, dur­ing the first lock­down in Eu­rope, Koen­raad Wied­haup found him­self in a so­cial­ly dis­tanced meet­ing with Jaap Goudsmit, Ronald Brus and Dinko Va­le­rio.

The trio had worked to­geth­er at Cru­cell and cre­at­ed a vac­cine plat­form that J&J has made its sin­gle-shot Covid-19 vac­cine on, a decade af­ter the phar­ma gi­ant inked a $2.4 bil­lion buy­out. Im­pressed with the speed of vac­cine de­vel­op­ment, the group how­ev­er pon­dered if fu­ture pan­demics called for a dif­fer­ent kind of prod­uct: a nasal spray that can pro­tect peo­ple from a whole range of virus­es for a few days, be­fore vac­cines be­come avail­able or when they need to ven­ture out to a par­tic­u­lar­ly risky sit­u­a­tion.

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