England is set to become the first country in the world to intentionally infect healthy volunteers with COVID-19 in what is known as the “human challenge study”. The country’s medical ethics body approved the process on Wednesday.
Funded by the British government, the $ 47 million study will play a crucial role in further effective development coronavirus vaccines and treatments, officials said.
The first such study is expected to begin next month, involving up to 90 carefully selected healthy volunteers between the ages of 18 and 30. They will be compensated for their time.
During the process, volunteers will be exposed to the least amount of virus needed to cause the infection, in a “safe and controlled environment”, to further understand its effects. The study will use the version of the virus circulating in the UK from March 2020, no 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 be at low risk in healthy young adults.”
They hope to identify the smallest amount of virus needed to cause the infection. The process will also help doctors and scientists understand how the immune system reacts to the virus and identify factors that affect how it is transmitted.
“Although there has been very positive progress in vaccine development, we want to find the best and most effective vaccines for long-term use,” Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said in a statement. These human challenge studies will take place here in the UK and will help accelerate scientists’ knowledge of how coronavirus affects humans and could eventually lead to the rapid development of vaccines.
The controversial study is different from the typical one vaccine studies, in which participants are given a vaccine or a placebo and then told to live their daily lives. In this case, the researchers expect some volunteers to eventually be exposed to the virus naturally.
However, challenge tests guarantee exposure in hopes of speeding up results. They have been used in the past to study diseases such as malaria, typhoid, cholera, and norovirus Flu.
After the first trial, a small number of volunteers may be given vaccine candidates who have undergone clinical trials to identify which are the most effective. This week, the UK reached its goal of vaccinating 15 million people with their first dose.
“We have provided 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 Vaccines Taskforce, told BBC News. “We expect these studies to provide unique insights into how the virus works and help us understand what promising vaccines offer the best chance of preventing infection.”