The spray is called “Pathogen Capture and Neutralizing Spray” (PCANS) for now

This data suggest PCANS as a promising daily-use prophylactic against respiratory infections.

The study is paywalled, and the abstract doesn’t list its ingredients beyond

The formulation consists of excipients identified from the FDA’s Inactive Ingredient Database and Generally Recognized as Safe list to maximize efficacy for each step in the multi-modal approach.

Based on that description, its ingredients might not be very different from Covixyl, though it claims to be much more effective.

Edit: Apparently its already for sale, I included some details in a comment

54 points
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This is a pre-print for a study that was done with mice. I love y’all, but don’t go replacing your normal precautions with untested alternatives just yet.

Edit: I was shocked that no one else was able to read the full text of the article yet I could. I guess that Bypass Paywall for Firefox is damn good. The best I could do for you all is a copy-paste job because the website won’t let me print out a PDF or anything.

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Oof yeah this is pretty early in development. I do like the 100% survival rate in their experimental group vs 0% survival in the control group, it seems like it might have some potential.

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11 points

You can get pretty good at designing studies that end up giving you results like that

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Why didn’t they mention this in my bs research ethic course :(

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30 points

it will be free right?

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If it’s anything like Covid tests, we’ll be lucky to get 3 of them for a period of 2 years

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25 points
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Paywalled scientific studies are cursed. Also, don’t get your hopes up, you can probably accomplish the same thing with a saline gel nasal spray you can get for 5 bucks at the drugstore.

Edit: Sorry for being so dismissive initially.

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16 points
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I don’t know how saline gel nasal sprays compare, but of existing nasal sprays, carrageenan (80% risk reduction) > hypromellose (78% risk reduction) > nitric oxide (75% risk reduction) > xylitol (62% risk reduction) according to the Clean Air Club, so nasal sprays aren’t all just the same thing.

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22 points
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In case people want to look at the studies being cited. The carrageenan and xylitol studies actually have placebo groups.

The hypromellose study is really bad, run by the CEO and VP of the company producing the product. Saying things like:

To our knowledge this is the first time that any measure to prevent infection in SARS-CoV-2 virus was proven effective beyond the use of masks.

D Megiddo is the CEO of Nasus Pharma, the manufacturer of Taffix. T Lapidot is the VP clinical of Nasus Pharma, the manufacturer of Taffix.

Both the hypromellose and nitric oxide studies relied on people administering it themselves and had no placebo groups. Basically the people who volunteered to take and use (self-reporting as well, instead of being administered by the researchers) the products are the same people who were already washing their hands, masking, etc.

Carrageenan

Hypromellose

Nitric Oxide

Xylitol

Honestly I was pretty surprised with the carrageenan study, seems worthwhile.

These other studies on carrageenan are incredibly dense, which is a good sign, but I also can’t really go through them thoroughly in any reasonable amount of time, but this stuff seems very good.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3001860/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8709357/#B35-ijms-22-13202

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5 points

Coming in with the anecdotes, but I’ve done a public facing job with often just the carrageenan spray as prevention in small unventilated spaces face to face with clients for 6 months now and never got sick from work.

I did get covid, but from family via my partner at home.

The last time I had to spend an hour with a visibly sick person was at the start of this week and so far so good. Might be immunity too from having just had covid a little over a month ago though. I wish masking was ok in my work, but it’s not.

But considering how high risk my work is and how all my co-workers sure are sick all the time and I’m not, it makes me think the spray might at least be helping. I also avoid gatherings and have an air purifier on my desk, I also don’t people on my freetime. So there are many reasons for this as well.

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6 points

so, simple question, what the hell is a nasal spray and how is it supposed to protect you from viruses?

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10 points

Gel sprays basically do the same thing your own snot is doing. Physically catch and trap particles/viruses and stop them from entering your body.

The saline gel spray I was talking about would just be a physical barrier, but the other ones we were talking about have some ingredient to actively kill viruses on top of being a barrier.

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6 points

so it’s enhanced snot.

ultrasnot

H Y P E R S N O T

that’s pretty sick, science is cool

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14 points
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Apparently the company calls it Profi and it’s already for sale for

$25 per bottle

but with a 15-25% discount if you do a subscription instead of a 1-time purchase. The amount of discount depends on how frequent your subscription is, though maybe you can just choose the most often one and cancel immediately anyway

Its ingredient list: pectin, gellan, phenylethyl alcohol, polysorbate 80, benzalkonium chloride, purified water

They say that it can be used up to 3 times per day but that there should be at least a 4-hour gap between uses

Their site’s Read the Science link takes you to the paywalled paper

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The paper looks to be a pure theory paper that contains no information on human trials. It’s frankly bizarre that they’re already selling this, and I’d recommend not buying it until it has passed human trials.

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6 points
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There’s no active ingredients, this is just a nasal gel. Just like we don’t do trials on a new brand of bandaid, this doesn’t need trials.

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I’d certainly like some trials proving its effectiveness in humans at preventing covid, preferably compared to the other nasal sprays that we do have human trials for

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Their site’s Read the Science link takes you to the paywalled paper

Lmao

“Read the science”

“Well, observe the existence of science behind this wall, anyway”

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7 points

“subscription”

Who ever spoke this word first should be in the lowest layer of hell.

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5 points

Profi(t)

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13 points

This looks like some quack VC stuff

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