Wanted: Volunteers to catch COVID-19 in the name of science
The
world's first medical trial authorised to deliberately expose participants to
the coronavirus is seeking more volunteers as it steps up efforts to help develop
better vaccines.
The Oxford University trial was launched last April, three months
after Britain became the first country to approve what are known as challenge
trials for humans involving COVID-19.
Its first phase, still ongoing, has focused on finding out how
much of the virus is needed to trigger an infection while the second will aim
to determine the immune response needed to ward one off, the university said in
a statement on Tuesday.
Researchers are close to establishing the weakest possible virus
infection that assures about half of people exposed to it get asymptomatic or
mild COVID-19.
They then plan to expose volunteers - all previously naturally
infected or vaccinated - to that dose of the virus's original variant to determine
what levels of antibodies or immune T-cells are required to prevent an
infection.
"This is the immune response we then need to induce with a
new vaccine," said Helen McShane, Oxford University Professor of
Vaccinology and the study's chief investigator.
The
trial's findings will help make future vaccine development much quicker and
more efficient, the statement said.
Global immunologists have been seeking to pinpoint the immune
reaction that a vaccine must produce to shield against the illness, known as a
correlate of protection. Once discovered, the need for mass vaccine trials is
greatly reduced.
Scientists have used human challenge trials for decades to develop
treatments against many infectious diseases, but this is the first known such
research into COVID-19.
A drawback is the risk of harm to volunteers contracting the
disease but the university is taking precautions.
Participants will need to be healthy and aged 18-30. They will be
quarantined for at least 17 days and any who develop symptoms will be given
Regeneron's monoclonal antibody treatment Ronapreve.
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