The UK plans to start the world’s first trial in which healthy volunteers were deliberately infected with coronavirus, after the study received ethical approval.
The so-called human challenge study will begin within a month, the UK’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said in a statement Wednesday, exposing up to 90 people to a very small amount of coronavirus in a safe and controlled environment. These types of studies are controversial because they expose healthy volunteers to potentially fatal diseases.
The next phase of the study, which has not yet been approved, involves administering a coronavirus vaccine to several volunteers and then exposing them to coronavirus. Only vaccines will be used that have “proven to be safe in clinical studies”. However, according to Terence Stephenson, chair of the Health Research Authority, who has granted ethical approval, researchers are still a long way from this phase of the research.
Proponents say these studies are the fastest way to evaluate new vaccines, especially when the world comes out of an active pandemic, said Robert Read, chief of clinical and experimental sciences within medicine at the University of Southampton, who belongs to this camp and part is part of the team involved in the investigation.
This first part of the research will help doctors understand how the immune system responds to the virus and determine what affects transmission. The drug Remdesivir will be used as soon as volunteers start to develop symptoms.
The volunteers, who are encouraged to come forward for the study, will be between the ages of 18 and 30 and will be exposed to the variant that has been circulating in the UK since March 2020.
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