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Bangalore / London / Paris / Frankfurt – Britain will host clinical trials in which volunteers are deliberately infected with the new coronavirus to test the efficacy of vaccine candidates, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday, citing people involved in the project.
The government-funded project is expected to begin in January at a quarantine facility in London, according to the report, adding that around 2,000 participants had signed up through a US-based advocacy group, 1Day Sooner.
Any trial conducted in the UK must be approved by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the health regulator that deals with safety and protocol.
The MHRA, 1Day Sooner and its 18-year-old main organizer, Alastair Fraser-Urquhart, did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Reuters.
The industry has seen discussions in recent months about the possibility of having to inject healthy volunteers with the new coronavirus if drug makers struggled to find enough patients for final trials.
The FT report said that volunteers would first be inoculated with a vaccine and then receive a challenge dose of the coronavirus. He did not mention the vaccines that would be evaluated in the project.
British pharmacist AstraZeneca, whose experimental Covid-19 vaccine being developed with the University of Oxford is leading the race, told Reuters it was not involved in the program.
French firm Sanofi also told Reuters it was not part of the initiative.
Imperial College, which is developing its own coronavirus vaccine and is the program’s academic partner, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Reuters
