From today itself, human trial of COVID-19 vaccine candidate will begin in the United Kingdom. This vaccine candidates are developed by research team of Oxford University. And they will receive initial funding of 22.2 million pound by UK government.
The team will enrol healthy volunteers aged between 18 – 55, who, if they pass screening, will be the first humans to test the new vaccine, called ChAdOx1 nCoV-19. The trial will provide valuable information on the safety aspects of the vaccine, as well as its ability to generate an immune response against the virus.
Professor Gilbert, lead researcher of the vaccine development programme, said, ‘Since the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, my research team has been working on new approaches to vaccine development to protect the population of the world against an outbreak of infectious disease or a pandemic. We are now working with a much larger team to bring these plans to fruition.’
Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Health & Social Care and MP for West Suffolk said on Wednesday," First today I am making 22.2 m pounds available to the imperial project to support their phase 2 clinical trials which are going to assess a sample of several thousand and for them to begin the work on subsequently a very large phase 3 trial."
He further said , "Second, I am today making available 20 million pound to the oxford team to fund their clinical trials. The team have accelerated that trial process working with the regulator the MHRA, who have been absolutely brilliant. And as a result I can announce the vaccine from the Oxford project will be trialled in people from this Thursday. In normal times reaching this stage would take years and I am very proud of the work taken so far. At the same time, we will invest in manufacturing capability so that if either of these vaccines safely works then we can make it available for the British people as soon as humanly possible. Nothing about this process is certain. Vaccine development is a process of tial and error and trial again. That's the nature of how vaccines are developed."
The vaccine is an adenovirus vaccine vector (ChAdOx1) and was developed at Oxford’s Jenner Institute. It was chosen as the most suitable vaccine technology for a SARS-CoV-2 (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 such as diabetes. Adenoviral vectors are a very well-studied vaccine type, having been used safely in thousands of subjects, from 1 week to 90 years of age, in vaccines targeting over 10 different diseases.
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 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. Professor Gilbert and team have previously developed a vaccine for another human coronavirus disease, which is Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and this has shown promise in early clinical trials.
