90 healthy adult volunteers will be infected with the new UK strain of COVID-19 to test vaccines and treatments

The world’s first human coronavirus testing study will start in the UK in a month, after approval by the British ethics body for clinical trials, announced the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Beis).

They will participate until 90 carefully selected healthy adult volunteers aged 18 to 30 who will be exposed to COVID-19 in a safe and controlled environment. Research will play a key role in the development of new vaccines and effective treatments. Volunteers will be compensated 4,500 pounds (approximately $ 6,200) for the time they devote to the study. London Hospital will host the world’s first “human trials”.

This step aims to determine the smallest amount of virus needed to cause infection, study the body’s immune response, and explore how the virus is passed from person to person.

Participants will be closely monitored by doctors and scientists 24 hours a day after exposure to the virus. The team adds that the virus used will be the variant that circulated in the UK last year rather than those that emerged recently.

Firsthand

The trial is expected to provide clinicians a better understanding of COVID-19, as an immune response necessary to provide protection against disease, and Help support the pandemic response by helping to develop vaccines and treatments. Those interested in participating have been invited to express their interest via the UK Covid Challenge website.

The study was supported by a £ 33.6million investment from the UK government and, after the initial trial, will continue to expose participants who have received COVID vaccines to the virus. This approach is not new, it has previously played a role in the development of treatments for other diseases, from cholera to influenza.

UK government affairs secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said the study was an important part of the disease control efforts. “Although there has been very positive progress in vaccine development, we want to find the best and most effective vaccines for long-term use,” he said at a press conference. . These studies on human challenges will be conducted here in the UK and will help accelerate scientists’ understanding of how the coronavirus affects people and could potentially support rapid vaccine development. “

The study’s principal investigator, Dr Chris Chiu of Imperial College London, said they were: “ask volunteers between the ages of 18 and 30 to join this research effort and help us understand how the virus infects people and how it is transmitted so successfully among us. Our ultimate goal is to find out which vaccines and treatments work best to overcome this disease, but we need volunteers to support us in this work ”.

Trials will begin in a month’s time at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, which has a unit specializing in infectious diseases. Maximum of 90 volunteers must show they have no history or symptoms of COVID-19, or underlying health issues and they do not have any known unwanted risk factors for Covid-19, such as diabetes or being overweight.

Volunteers will be quarantined for two days upon arrival at the Royal Free, where they will be allocated a private room with en-suite bathroom on the 11th floor “with great views over London”. They will then receive the smallest possible dose of COVID-19 and spend the next 14 days in hospital, monitored and subjected to a series of tests.

They will be allowed to return home after a period of 17 days if they are no longer contagious and will be asked to participate in follow-up checks for the next 12 months as a condition of receiving the last installments of £ 4,500 in compensation. LThe researchers said the first payments were £ 88 per day. These trials speed up research on diseases and vaccines because volunteers do not need to be infected “naturally” in the community. These types of surveys have already been used to develop treatments for influenza, malaria, typhoid fever, norovirus, and the common cold.

The first part of the study will be to establish the minimum amount of COVID virus needed to cause infection in healthy participants. It’s called a virus characterization study, and the protocol has now received ethical approval from that country’s health research authority, allowing it to move forward.

Requests have not yet been submitted for other parts of the study, which could involve volunteers receiving a new test vaccine or a variant of the virus. The “ original ” version of COVID that has been circulating in the UK since last March will be used, which has been shown to be low risk in healthy young adults, as opposed to the Kent or South African variants, which are both faster in transmission.

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