(Adds a statement from a potential volunteer, expert comment)
By Kate Kelland and Paul Sandle
LONDON, February 17 (Reuters) – Britain became the first country in the world on Wednesday to give the go-ahead for human challenge tests in which volunteers will be deliberately exposed to COVID-19 to advance research into the disease. caused by the new coronavirus.
The test, which is due to begin within a month, will see up to 90 healthy volunteers aged 18 to 30 years exposed to the least amount of the virus needed to cause the infection, scientists responsible for the plans told reporters at a news conference.
Volunteers will be screened for possible health risks before being allowed to participate and will be kept in quarantine for close monitoring by medical staff for at least 14 days in a specialized facility at London’s Royal Free Hospital.
“The top priority, of course, is the safety of volunteers,” said Peter Openshaw, professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College London, who is co-leading the project with the UK government’s vaccine task force and the company hVIVO clinic. “None of us want to do that if there is a considerable risk.”
Scientists have been using human challenge tests for decades to learn more about diseases like malaria, flu, typhoid and cholera, and to develop treatments and vaccines against them.
UK COVID-19 challenge test participants will be allowed to go home after the initial 14 days only if “extensive tests” show that they are not infectious, said Chris Chiu of Imperial, the test’s lead investigator.
Activists in a group called 1Day Sooner, which has been lobbying governments around the world to conduct tests on humans with the new coronavirus, welcomed the UK initiative, saying it would speed up research on vaccines and COVID-19 treatments.
Alistair Fraser-Urquhart, an activist who said he would like to participate in the study, said in a statement that he “spent a lot of time thinking” about risks, but was “ready to take them on for the benefit of others”.
Chiu said the objective of this initial work is “to understand how the virus infects people and how it passes so successfully between us”.
More testing using challenge models could be conducted in the coming months and years to establish which vaccines and treatments work best, he said.
Volunteers will receive compensation payments of around £ 88 ($ 122) per day during the study, which will also involve follow-up monitoring for one year, said the Chiu team, and the studies will be conducted in a safe and controlled environment and will minimize any risk.
To make the test as safe as possible, the version of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that has been circulating in England since March 2020 will be used instead of one of the new variants, they said.
Lawrence Young, a virologist and professor of molecular oncology at Warwick University who is not involved in the study, said that – like others who used other pathogens before him – it should provide crucial information about the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
“Human challenge tests … have been used to study infections … ranging from the common cold virus to malaria,” he said. “These controlled studies provide information on the pathogen-host interaction, facilitate the identification of protective correlates and accelerate the development of vaccines and new therapies.”
($ 1 = £ 0.7213) (Bernadette Baum edition)
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