BackInfecting volunteers may speed up coronavirus vaccine studies: WHO
Vaccines are usually tested in large groups, and the results are compared with a separate group of unvaccinated peopleWaiting for both groups to become exposed to the illness in their regular daily lives can take months
PremiumDeliberately infecting healthy volunteers with the virus that causes Covid-19 may speed studies of vaccines against the deadly pathogen, the World Health Organization said. Such studies, which pose significant potential dangers to subjects, may be considered in dire situations and with certain disclosures and protections, a working group of the WHO said in a report posted on its website.
Controlled human infection studies (or “human challenge studies") involve the deliberate infection of healthy volunteers.
"Such studies can be particularly valuable for testing vaccine. They can be substantially faster to conduct than vaccine field trials, in part because far fewer participants need to be exposed to experimental vaccines in order to provide (preliminary) estimates of efficacy and safety," the report said.
"Such studies can be used to compare the efficacy of multiple vaccine candidates and thus select the most promising vaccines for larger studies. Well designed challenge studies might thus not only accelerate COVID-19 vaccine development , but also make it more likely that the vaccines ultimately deployed are more effective."
Researchers around the world are racing to develop vaccines to protect against the deadly coronavirus and allow countries to rebuild teetering economies.
The report laid out eight conditions that would need to be fulfilled for challenge studies to be considered, including scientific justification, an assessment of potential benefits and the fully informed consent of subjects.
"Challenge studies have a long history, including early research with smallpox, yellow fever and malaria that changed the course of global public health. In the last 50 years, challenge studies have been performed safely in tens of thousands of consenting adult volunteers under the oversight of research ethics committees," the report said.
"These studies have recently helped, for example, to accelerate the development of vaccines against typhoid and cholera, and to determine correlates of immune protection against influenza."
Vaccines are usually tested in large groups, and the results are compared with a separate group of unvaccinated people. Waiting for both groups to become exposed to the illness in their regular daily lives can take months, while challenge studies would ensure that the subjects were promptly exposed to the virus.
Volunteers would typically be healthy, young adults at a relatively low risk of serious disease, and would be monitored and cared for, the scientists said.
Foundation 1daysooner has a website where people can sign up to participate in a human challenge trial for Covid-19, if one were to occur. Nearly 14,000 volunteers from 102 countries have signed up so far. (With Bloomberg Inputs)
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