First human trials for Covid-19 vaccine to begin on Thursday

The first human trials for a Covid-19 vaccine will begin on Thursday (23 April) led by the University of Oxford.

The news follows a press briefing by health secretary Matt Hancock during which he announced an additional £42.5 million to support two vaccine projects, taking place at the University of Oxford and Imperial College London.

"Both of these promising projects are making rapid progress and I've told the scientists leading them we will do everything in our power to support," Hancock said during the press briefing.

He added: "After all, the upside of being the first country in the world to develop a successful vaccine is so huge that I am throwing everything at it."

The University of Oxford will receive £20 million to fund its clinical trial, which started recruiting patients in March whilst undergoing preclinical work to ensure the vaccine was being manufactured to clinical grade standard.

The University of Oxford’s vaccine, named ChAdOx1, is an adenovirus vaccine vector chosen as the most suitable vaccine technology as it’s able to generate a strong immune response from one dose. More so, since the vaccine is not a replicating virus, it cannot cause an ongoing infection making it safer to give children, the elderly, and those with pre-existing conditions.

The clinical trial will include 510 volunteers, who will receive either the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine or a control injection for comparison.

Manufacturing capacity for the vaccine is also being scaled up so the team can ensure they can produce as many doses as possible for larger clinical trials, and potentially, deployment.

Dr Sandy Douglas, who is leading the vaccine manufacturing scale-up project, said: "The scale of this epidemic poses a huge challenge for vaccine manufacturing. We need to follow rigorous safety standards and that takes time. By starting work on large-scale manufacturing immediately, we hope to accelerate the availability of high quality, safe vaccine."

In response to the additional funding by the government, professors Andrew Pollard, Sarah Gilbert and Adrian Hill, who are leading the Oxford vaccine project said: 

“The Oxford Covid vaccine team are delighted with Tuesday’s announcement by the Secretary of State for Health of funding for the evaluation of the new COVID19 vaccine. This week we will start the process of vaccine evaluation in our first human studies and are currently focussing all efforts on preparing for the start of the trials. Although it seems like a very long time since the work started, in reality it is less than four months since we first heard of an outbreak of severe pneumonia cases, and began to plan a response. Our brilliant team has been working tirelessly to get to this point using our skills and experience in vaccine development and testing, and will do the best job possible in moving quickly whilst at all times prioritising the safety of the trial participants.”

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