LONDON: Britain became the first country in the world on Wednesday to approve human challenge tests in which volunteers take out Covid-19 specifically for research forward. The trial, which is set to begin within a month, sees up to 90 healthy volunteers between the ages of 18 and 30 exposed to the minimum amount of the virus needed to cause infection.
Volunteers will be screened for potential health risks, and kept in quarantine for close surveillance for at least 14 days in a specialist unit at the Royal Free Hospital London. “The overall priority, of course, is the safety of volunteers,” said Peter Openshaw, an experimental professor of medicine at Imperial College London, who is co-leading the project with the UK government’s vaccines action group and hVIVO clinical company.
Volunteers will receive compensation of around £ 88 per day for the duration of the study, which will also include a one-year follow-up study, said Imperial’s Chris Chiu team, the trial’s chief investigator. To make the test safe, the version of the SARS-CoV-2 virus circulating in England from March 2020 will be used, rather than a new version, they said. Scientists have used human challenge experiments for decades to learn more about diseases such as malaria, flu, typhoid and cholera, and to develop cures.
Volunteers will be screened for potential health risks, and kept in quarantine for close surveillance for at least 14 days in a specialist unit at the Royal Free Hospital London. “The overall priority, of course, is the safety of volunteers,” said Peter Openshaw, an experimental professor of medicine at Imperial College London, who is co-leading the project with the UK government’s vaccines action group and hVIVO clinical company.
Volunteers will receive compensation of around £ 88 per day for the duration of the study, which will also include a one-year follow-up study, said Imperial’s Chris Chiu team, the trial’s chief investigator. To make the test safe, the version of the SARS-CoV-2 virus circulating in England from March 2020 will be used, rather than a new version, they said. Scientists have used human challenge experiments for decades to learn more about diseases such as malaria, flu, typhoid and cholera, and to develop cures.