The UK is set to begin the world’s first study of healthy volunteers intentionally infected with coronavirus after the study received ethical approval.
The so-called human challenge study will begin within a month, the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said in a statement on Wednesday, with up to 90 people being exposed to a very small amount of coronavirus in an environment. safe and controlled. These types of studies are controversial because they expose healthy volunteers to diseases that could be fatal.
The next stage of the study, which has not yet been approved, will involve administering a coronavirus vaccine to different volunteers and exposing them to the coronavirus. Only vaccines that “have been shown to be safe in clinical trials” will be used. However, researchers are still “a long way off” from this stage of the study, according to Terence Stephenson, chair of the Health Research Authority, which approved the ethics.
Proponents say these studies provide the fastest way to evaluate new vaccines, especially when the world emerges from an active pandemic, said Robert Read, head of clinical and experimental science in medicine at the University of Southampton. camps and is part of the team involved in the study.
This initial part of the study will help doctors understand how the immune system reacts to the virus and identify what affects transmission. Remdesivir will be used as soon as the volunteers start to develop symptoms.
Volunteers, who are encouraged to apply for the study, will be between 18 and 30 years old and will be exposed to the variant circulating in the UK from March 2020.
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