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Volunteers to be injected with coronavirus as hunt for COVID-19 vaccine heats up: How will it help

Highlights

• As scientists across the world scramble to find a safe vaccine for COVID-19, healthy adults will be injected with the virus
• The aim of the Human Challenge Trials is to help speed up vaccine development
• Till date, there is no specific treatment for the novel coronavirus infection

New Delhi: As the race to find a cure for novel coronavirus infection heats up across the world, founders of a program called ‘1 Day Sooner’, along with some volunteers are preparing to be purposefully injected with the virus to speed up the development of a safe vaccine. The 'COVID-19 Human Challenge Trials' will deliberately expose participants to the SARS-CoV-2 virus infection in an attempt to study diseases, test vaccines, or treatments.

With no vaccine in sight, researchers are exploring ways, including human challenge trials to see if it could fast-track the vaccine development process, which can help save millions of lives. For hundreds of years, scientists have been using human challenge trials to test the effectiveness of vaccines such as influenza, smallpox, malaria, typhoid, dengue fever and cholera.

Vaccine development is a long, complex process involving multiple stages of testing. Firstly, a vaccine candidate is tested on animals to see if it’s safe and whether it triggers an immune response. The experimental vaccine is then tested on a  small group of humans for safety and immune response. If the vaccine results are encouraging, a Phase 2 trial is carried out on a larger, more representative population of several hundred subjects. The Phase 3 clinical trials are the longest and involve thousands of participants, evaluating the effectiveness of the vaccine. Here, researchers look at various aspects such as differences in infection risk and side effects between those receiving the vaccine and those administered a placebo - before a vaccine is considered safe enough for regulators to approve for widespread use. This is important because the hope is to find a vaccine that reduces the risk of infection as well as causes no severe side effects. So, the whole process can be both complex and long.

However, in the case of human challenge trials, all study participants are deliberately exposed to the pathogen under highly controlled conditions.

We could rely on a much lower number of volunteers and, with luck, develop a safe, effective, and broadly available vaccine in a much shorter period of time.

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