The UK is ready to start the world’s first trial of healthy volunteers being intentionally infected with coronavirus after the study has received ethical approval.
The so-called human challenge study will begin in a month, the UK Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said in a statement on Wednesday, with up to 90 people exposed to a very small amount of coronavirus in a safe and secure environment. controlled. These types of tests are controversial, as they expose healthy volunteers to diseases that can be fatal.
The next stage of the study, which has not yet been approved, will involve administering a coronavirus vaccine to different volunteers and then exposing them to the coronavirus. Only vaccines that “have proven to be safe in clinical trials” will be used. However, researchers are still “far” from this phase of the study, according to Terence Stephenson, president of the Health Research Authority, who gave ethical approval.
Proponents say these studies provide the fastest way to evaluate new vaccines, especially when the world emerges from an active pandemic, said Robert Read, head of clinical and experimental sciences in medicine at the University of Southampton, who belongs to this field and does part of the team involved in the study.
This initial part of the study will help doctors understand how the immune system reacts to the virus and to identify what affects transmission. Remdesivir will be used as soon as volunteers start to develop symptoms.
The volunteers, who are being encouraged to participate in the study, will be between 18 and 30 years old and will have been exposed to the variant in circulation in the UK since March 2020.
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