The University of Oxford has begun screening healthy volunteers between ages 18-55 for an upcoming ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine trial to take place in the Thames Valley Region. The vaccine is based on an adenovirus vaccine vector and the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and it’s already in production and expected to be ready in a few weeks.
Oxford’s Jenner Institute and the Vaccine Group clinical teams will work in collaboration for the study. Some of the volunteers will receive the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine and others will receive a “control injection” for comparing.
Experts have been weighing in on the study such as Dr. Doug Brown, the Chief Executive of the British Society for Immunology, said:
It’s fantastic to see the research team at the University of Oxford to get this trial up and running in record time. This trial is, without a doubt, a huge step forwards in our attempts to find a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, but we should remember that we can only speed up the research effort by so much. This will give us the best chance of developing an effective vaccine and developing it soon.
The team from Oxford led by Professor Sarah Gilbert began working to develop a vaccine on January 10th, 2020. An adenovirus vaccine vector is a type of vaccine which stimulates a strong immune response without replicating a virus.
Professor Stephen Evans from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and Professor of Pharmacoepidemiology, further explains an adenovirus vaccine:
Using an adenovirus vaccine vector is a way to get the antigen (not the virus itself) into people so that their own immune system generates a defense against SARS-Cov-2. Having the general structure (platform) already means that some of the safety issues around that will have been studied carefully, to try and ensure that the risk to anyone taking the vaccine is as low as possible.
He goes on to say that adenovirus vaccines have taken a long time to get to this point, which allows them to be used in a clinical trial quicker than other types. The basic structures have been used for several different diseases including HIV, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.
Professor Andrew Pollard is the Chief Investigator of the study who talks about the importance of such studies:
Starting the clinical trials is the first step in the efforts to find out whether the new vaccine being developed at Oxford University works and could safely play a central role in controlling the pandemic coronavirus that is sweeping the globe.
Professor Gilbert and her team have been working on new approaches to vaccine development since the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014. They have been working in preparation for scenarios like the one we are now facing. Gilbert and her team developed an experimental vaccine for a different coronavirus disease called Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) that has shown promise in its early trials.
Production of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine to be trialed is already being scaled up for larger trials in hopes they will have good results. Dr. Sandy Douglas, who is in charge of vaccine manufacturing, had this to say,
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
For more information on this vaccine visit: https://covid19vaccinetrial.co.uk
