Harvard scientists say this $25 nasal spray beats flu, colds and COVID-19 with 99% success

If this flu-busting nasal spray lives up to its promise, it will be a blockbuster.

Scientists at Harvard Medical School have developed a simple nasal spray, made of harmless ingredients, that they reckon can protect us against flu, colds and COVID-19 with near-100% success.

The cost: $25.

In a paper just published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Advanced Materials, the researchers say the spray “coats the nasal cavity, capturing large respiratory droplets from the air, and serving as a physical barrier against a broad spectrum of viruses and bacteria, while rapidly neutralizing them with over 99.99% effectiveness.” In other words, it catches the viruses and bacteria at the typical point of entry into our bodies — the nose — and stops them there.

There are plenty of caveats. These results came from a study involving mice, not people. The study was conducted in a laboratory, not the outside world. The spray has not gone through the cumbersome process of getting regulated as a medical treatment by the Food and Drug Administration and is instead being sold as a personal-care product. Researchers used a 3D-printed replica of a human nose to test the nasal spray’s efficacy.

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Nonetheless, the news is promising: The product is cheap, its ingredients are harmless and it might reduce our risk of getting colds or flu during winter flu season.

“In … research in our labs, the nasal spray reduced the load of viruses and bacteria — including Influenza A and B, SARS-CoV-2, RSV, adenovirus and a bacterial form of pneumonia — by over 99.99% and persisted in the nose for eight hours,” Harvard’s Jeffrey Karp tells MarketWatch.

It is the first such spray to come close to this type of protection, the researchers say. Previous sprays have provided between 20% and 70% protection.

In a laboratory experiment where mice were exposed to a severe flu virus, they report, all of the mice who were given the new spray survived. Among mice who were not given the spray, none survived.

The potential of a spray like this is hard to overestimate. Over 1 million Americans died with COVID in the recent pandemic. Globally about 5.5 million are reported to have died with COVID, but excess deaths during 2020 and 2021 may have actually been three times as high as the number of confirmed deaths.

Every year flu kills between 5,000 and 50,000 Americans, nearly all of them over 50 and most of them over 65.

Worldwide, flu kills about 700,000 people a year.

To this we might also add the huge, if less dramatic, personal cost — the human and economic toll taken by colds and flu every year on so many of us.

Medical experts recommend we get a flu vaccine every year around this time. Many people take other measures as well, including face masks and dietary supplements, including vitamins. There is still debate about how effective such measures are.

The scientists call their new spray the Pathogen Capture and Neutralizing Spray, or PCANS, though they are marketing it under the more euphonious name Profi.

The ingredients are pectin, gellan, polysorbate 80, benzalkonium chloride, and phenethyl alcohol, Harvard assistant professor Nitin Joshi tells MarketWatch. All were drawn from the FDA’s inactive-ingredients database and “generally recognized as safe” list.

“We performed rigorous screening of ingredients that have been used in approved nasal formulations or have been widely recognized for their safety, and identified combinations and concentrations that maximize effectiveness and safety,” Joshi says.

Due to the cumbersome federal regulatory structure, the researchers decided not to seek FDA approval, which can take years, to market the spray as a medical product. Instead they are selling it as a personal-care product. “Because of the nature of the ingredients … we do not need clinical trials (and we don’t make any medical claims — as this is regulated as a personal care product/cosmetic),” they say.

In other words, due to regulations, even though research published in a peer-reviewed journal points toward 99.99% effectiveness, they can’t make these claims in their marketing materials.

Profi is currently being sold in the U.S., Canada and Australia. Will it help us stay healthy in the coming winter flu season? Let’s hope.