The race to find a vaccine for the novel coronavirus seems to be hotting up as the United Kingdom is set to begin testing a new vaccine for the disease from Thursday.
According to the UK Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, a potential vaccine is being developed at the University of Oxford. He said this during a press briefing.
The vaccine project is being run by the Jenner Institute and Oxford Vaccine Group. The project will receive £20 billion funding the UK government.
“We are going to back them to the hilt and give them every resource they need to give them the best chance of success,” the Health Secretary said.
Chief Investigator and Professor of Paediatric Infection and Immunity, Andrew Pollard, said the new cash injection would go to the clinical trials.
“Almost all of that funding will be going on the clinical trial development programme to make sure that we can fully test the vaccine in healthy younger adults,” Prof Pollard told Sky News following the Government’s announcement.
“Then we’ll move on to test the vaccine in other age groups,” he said
The World Health Organisation has maintained that a vaccine for COVID-19 is about 12 to 18 months away. But the Oxford team are expected to produce a vaccine candidate by late August.
The Oxford University team’s experimental product, called “ChAdOx1 nCoV-19”, is a type of immunisation known as a recombinant viral vector vaccine and is just one of at least 70 potential COVID-19 candidate shots under development by biotech and research teams around the world.
It was chosen as a suitable vaccine technology as it can generate a strong immune response from one dose, the team said.
Media reports have said about 500 people between the ages of 18 to 55 have volunteered to take part in the trial.
The trial will divide a total of 510 participants sent five groups, with one group receiving a follow-up, booster shot of the vaccine after the original does.
The technology behind the vaccine has already been used in developing about 10 different other treatments, but will require an approach that includes setting up different test groups in different countries to ensure representative results, since infection rates are varying greatly place to place with prevention measures in place, study lead Sarah Gilbert told Bloomberg.
When asked how they managed to move the usually lengthy process of vaccine approval along so quickly, Professor Sarah Gilbert, who is leading the study, said it was their ongoing research into Disease X – an as yet unknown infectious agent earmarked as a potential pandemic in the making – which allowed them to pivot so quickly to Covid-19.
“Last year my team was already working on vaccines against Lassa Fever, Mers, which is another coronavirus vaccine, and also Disease X,” Professor Gilbert said.
According to Gilbert: “The ChAdOx vaccne, is a so-called platform technology, which can be used to make vaccines against lots of different diseases.”
Source: Opera mini
