The UK’s first human trials for a coronavirus vaccine began today at Oxford University.
The trials will take place on 500 people and will first focus on safety and tolerability. It will also include an initial assessment of how effective the vaccine is in eliciting an immune response to Covid-19.
Half of the people in the trial will have the Covid-19 vaccine and half will have a meningitis vaccine – but none of the participants will know which vaccine they will have. Over time, as people show coronavirus-like symptoms, they will return to the university labs to get tested, so scientists can determine whether the vaccine works.
The trial is on ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, which is based on a chimpanzee adenovirus modified to include the spike or ‘S’ protein on the surface of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the Covid-19 disease.
An adenovirus is a group of viruses that infect the eyes, respiratory system, intestines, urinary tract, and nervous system. Adenovirus vaccines can elicit an anti-body response to these viruses, which includes the new coronavirus, to help the body fight them.he Oxford University team, led by Professor Sarah Gilbert, have had experience of working on a vaccine for the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014. Providing the study is successful, Prof Gilbert has said that more extensive research could be conducted and that a million doses of the vaccine may be ready as early as September.
British Health Secretary Matt Hancock praised the team on Wednesday for its quick progress and said that the UK was reaching this stage that in normal times would “take years.”
The government has given £20 million (Dh91m/US$25m) to the university’s team and a further £22.5m to Imperial College, where another Covid-19 vaccine is being developed. The Imperial team is set to begin human trials in June.
“It’s fantastic to see the research team at the University of Oxford get this vaccine trial up and running in record time,” Arne Akbar, President of the British Society for Immunology told The National.
“The UK leads the world for the quality of our immunology research and this is another great example of how the community has come together to drive forward scientific discovery into this pandemic and to work towards developing a safe and effective vaccine.”
But he warned that developing a vaccine for the coronavirus would not be an easy task and that it was crucial scientists have an in-depth understanding of the exact immune response to SARS-CoV-2.
"All vaccine candidates will still need to go through many stages of testing to ensure that they are both safe and effective for wide scale use. We need to be realistic about the timescale in which this can take place,” he added.
"We also know that everyone’s immune system functions differently, in particular older people often generate less potent and long lasting immune responses to vaccination. As this group is particularly vulnerable to Covid-19, we also need to keep supporting research efforts into other approaches including developing new medicines and repurposing existing drugs which may be effective treatments for patients with Covid-19.”
“Well done to the Oxford Team and despite all the notes of caution, we sincerely hope the vaccine works,” he said.
Although Professor Gilbert was optimistic in an interview on Sunday about her candidate, she warned that there was no guarantee the vaccine she was working on would be effective.
“That’s why we have to do trials to find out. The prospects are very good but clearly not completely certain,” she told the BBC.
She called on the government to help support the rapid manufacturing of the vaccine, should it be proven to be effective.
On Friday, the government began a large-scale test on some 20,000 households in England to help understand the current rate of infection and how many people would have likely developed antibodies to the virus.
SOURCE : NATIONAL AE