COVID19 Vaccine Available By October – Oxford Scientists
Sarah Gilbert, a professor of vaccinology at the University of Oxford said a vaccine trial for COVID-19 will start by May by administrating vaccine shots to 500 participants.
The early and mid-stage randomized, controlled trial will be carried out in individuals aged between 18 to 55.
Phase 3 results of the vaccine trial should be available by the autumn of 2020 and are expected to manufacture large amounts of the vaccine. But Gilbert also added that these time frames are highly ambitious and subject to change.
Gilbert began her studies on vaccines from the University of Oxford in 1994. To ramp up her team’s attempts to explore vaccine research for the novel coronavirus, UK Research and Innovation and UK’s National Institute for Health Research granted her $2.8 million in March.
Remarkably, Gilbert’s experimental immunization was one of the firsts to make to the clinical trial stage. 70 vaccine candidates in development along with three others that are being tested in humans were recognized by the World Health Organization.
The COVID-19 vaccine should be ready by October. Gilbert’s vaccine will be tested in 510 volunteers, divided into five groups and will be monitored
for nearly six months. They will have the choice of a follow-up visit for a year after joining the trial.Four weeks after the preliminary immunization, one of the five groups will receive the second intramuscular shot of the vaccine.
The effectiveness and safety of the potential vaccine named ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 will be monitored by the researchers.
As a control, randomly chosen participants will receive a vaccine against meningococcal disease.
If the pandemic goes down to an extent in the UK, a portion of the clinical research may need to be shifted out of the UK as the effectiveness can’t be reliably ascertained there anymore.
The amount of virus transmission in the local population over the summer will affect the researchers’ ability to determine vaccine efficacy. Therefore they are planning to start trials in other countries to increase their ability to determine the efficacy of the vaccine, said Gilbert.
ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, developed from a harmless virus called an adenovirus, is a recombinant viral vector vaccine that has been modified to express the surface spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
The vaccine works by training the human immune system to detect and attack the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Gilbert’s team had previously developed a vaccine against the MERS coronavirus using the same method and it had shown great potential in animal and early-stage human testing. The new COVID19 vaccine is expected to be available by October.
According to Gilbert, the World Health Organization is creating a platform for everyone developing COVID-19 vaccine to share their plans and preliminary findings.
