Oxford Covid-19 Vaccine Trial On 510 Humans From Today

LONDON, 23 APRIL 2020:

 

The Covid-19 vaccine being developed by the University of Oxford will be tested on hundreds of humans in Britain from Thursday, UK health secretary Matt Hancock announced on Tuesday.

 

A total of 510 healthy volunteers, aged 18 to 55, will take part in the trial. While some participants will receive the vaccine – called ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 - others will take a control injection for comparison. The trial will continue over a couple of weeks.

 

The trial, the fourth Covid-19 vaccine to proceed to human trials globally, will provide valuable information on the safety aspects of the vaccine, as well as its ability to generate an immune response against the virus

 

Coronaviruses have club-shaped spikes on their outer coats. Immune responses from other coronavirus studies suggest that these are a good target for a vaccine.

 

The Oxford vaccine contains the genetic sequence of this surface spike protein inside the adenovirus vaccine vector (ChAdOx1) construct.

 

After vaccination, the surface spike protein of the coronavirus is produced, which primes the immune system to attack the coronavirus if it later infects the body.

 

A chimpanzee adenovirus vaccine vector (ChAdOx1) was chosen as the most suitable vaccine technology for a Covid-19 vaccine as it can generate a strong immune response from one dose and it is not a replicating virus, so it cannot cause an ongoing infection in the vaccinated individual.

 

This also makes it safer to give to children, the elderly and anyone with a pre-existing condition.

 

Chimpanzee adenoviral vectors have been used safely in thousands of subjects in vaccines targeting over 10 different diseases.

 

At the same time as conducting the first clinical trial, production of the vaccine is already being scaled up for larger trials, and potentially, future deployment.

 

Dr Sandy Douglas, who is leading on the scaling-up, said: “By starting work on large-scale manufacturing immediately, we hope to accelerate the availability of high quality, safe vaccine.”

 

The second phase of the clinical trials involves increasing the maximum age of those who receive the vaccine to above 70. The third phase is to vaccinate 5000 volunteers aged over 18 years, giving half of them the Covid-19 vaccine.

 

“The best-case scenario is that by the autumn of 2020, we could have an efficacy result from the phase 3 trial to show that the vaccine protects against the virus, alongside the ability to manufacture large amounts of the vaccine, but these best-case timeframes are highly ambitious and subject to change,” a spokesperson for the Oxford vaccine trial said.

 

On Tuesday Hancock awarded the Oxford vaccine project a further £20m and the Imperial College London project £22.5m. Imperial College has been testing an RNA vaccine candidate in animals since early February. Early findings have shown that animals given the vaccine are able to produce neutralising antibodies against the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. The next stage is to test whether it can produce the same response in humans. ET Healthword