England will become the first country in the world to intentionally infect healthy volunteers with COVID-19 in what is known as a “human challenge study”. The country’s medical ethics body approved the trial on Wednesday.
Funded by the British government, the $ 47 million study will play a crucial role in continuing the development of effective systems. coronavirus vaccines and treatments, officials said.
The first study of this challenge is expected to begin next month, with the participation of up to 90 healthy and carefully selected volunteers aged 18 to 30 years. They will be compensated for their time.
During the test, volunteers will be exposed to the minimum amount of virus needed to cause infection, in a “safe and controlled environment,” to better understand its effects. The study will use the version of the virus circulating in the UK from March 2020, not the version new variants.
Officials noted that doctors and scientists will closely monitor participants 24 hours a day and stressed that the March 2020 strain “has been shown to pose a low risk in healthy young adults.”
They hope to identify the minimum amount of virus needed to cause infection. The trial will also help doctors and scientists understand how the immune system reacts to the virus and identify the factors that affect its transmission.
“While there has been very positive progress in vaccine development, we want to find the best and most effective vaccines for long-term use,” Trade Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said in a statement. “These human challenge studies will be conducted here in the UK and will help accelerate scientists’ knowledge of how the coronavirus affects people and could ultimately encourage the rapid development of vaccines.”
The controversial study is different from the typical one vaccine trials, in which participants receive a vaccine or a placebo and then tell them to do their daily life. In this case, the researchers hope that some volunteers will end up being exposed to the virus naturally.
Challenge trials, however, guarantee exposure in hopes of speeding up results. They have been used in the past to study diseases such as malaria, typhoid, cholera, norovirus and grip.
After the first trial, a small number of volunteers could be given vaccine candidates who have passed clinical trials to identify which ones are the most effective. This week, the UK hit the target of vaccinating 15 million people with its first dose.
“We have secured a number of safe and effective vaccines for the UK, but it is essential that we continue to develop new vaccines and treatments for COVID-19,” Clive Dix, interim chair of the vaccine working group, told BBC News. “We hope these studies provide unique information about how the virus works and help us understand what promising vaccines offer the best chance of preventing infection.”