UK set to be first country to expose healthy people to COVID-19 in studies
pharmafile | October 21, 2020 | News story | Research and Development |
The UK is set to be the first country to conduct challenge trials which will see healthy volunteers intentionally exposed to COVID-19.
The trials are planned to begin as early as January and aim to speed up the development of a vaccine. The UK Government is putting £33.6 million into the project but the plan still needs a sign-off from regulators before it can go ahead. It will be conducted as a collaboration between the Imperial College London, a company called hVIVO and the Royal Free Hospital’s specialist and secure research unit in London.
Volunteers will be aged between 18 and 30 and would be exposed to controlled doses of the virus to discover what is the smallest amount that can cause an infection. The infection will be done through the nose, and they will then be monitored around the clock. The patients will stay in a biosecure facility until they are no longer infectious, and will be monitored for up to a year after being infected to assess long-term side-effects.
Dr Chris Chiu, the lead researcher on the project at Imperial College London, said: “My team has been safely running human challenge studies with other respiratory viruses for over 10 years. No study is completely risk-free, but the Human Challenge Programme partners will be working hard to ensure we make the risks as low as we possibly can.”
While the aim of this study is to help with vaccine development, it will also be useful to see how the virus evolves and infects the body.
Professor Julian Savulescu, an expert on ethics at Oxford University, said that: “In a pandemic, time is lives. So far, over a million people have died. There is a moral imperative to develop to a safe and effective vaccine – and to do so as quickly as possible…Given the stakes, it is unethical not to do challenge studies.”
Conor Kavanagh
