By Denise Roland
Thousands of people have volunteered to be infected in the hope
of finding a vaccine for the new coronavirus.
hVIVO, a clinical research group in London, has attracted more
than 20,000 volunteers willing to be infected with tamer relatives
of the virus that causes Covid-19 in exchange for a fee of GBP3,500
($4,480). It says such experiments could play an important role in
the development of a vaccine against the new coronavirus, for which
there are no proven treatments or vaccines.
Unlike drugs, which are tested on people who already have a
particular illness, vaccines have to be given to healthy people who
are later exposed to a disease. Typically, this is done by giving
an experimental vaccine to thousands of people in an area where an
infection is circulating, and then tracking them for months or even
years. The vaccine is considered successful if those who got the
shot avoid infection.
One way of getting a quicker read on a vaccine's effectiveness
is by giving it to people who are then deliberately infected with
the bug in question. Such challenge studies are routinely used in
the development of vaccines for the flu, common cold and other
respiratory illnesses.
Usually, a few dozen participants are tracked closely for a few
weeks for signs of illness after infection. These trials don't
replace the larger field studies, but they help give direction on
whether a vaccine is worth pursuing.
For Covid-19, too little is known about who is most susceptible
to serious illness or death to run a challenge study using the new
coronavirus that causes the disease. Still, hVIVO hopes that using
its relatives can nonetheless offer clues for vaccine development.
Coronaviruses are a large family that cause a range of illnesses
from the common cold to more serious diseases like SARS and
MERS.
"It gives you a sieve and gives you some confidence that things
are going to be all right," said John Oxford, emeritus professor of
virology at Queen Mary University of London, and chair of hVIVO's
advisory board. "There have been no human coronavirus vaccines, we
don't know what they'll be like."
hVIVO -- a subsidiary of pharmaceutical-services company Open
Orphan PLC -- is one of just a handful of companies that develop
and run challenge studies for drug and vaccine makers.
Such studies are much faster and cheaper than full field studies
and can help researchers select the most promising candidate
vaccines to be taken forward into broader trials.
hVIVO is currently in early discussions with drugmakers racing
to develop a coronavirus vaccine and says it will be ready to offer
its challenge tests to clients in the next two to three months.
After advertising and media coverage, the company was inundated
with volunteers. More than 20,000 signed up in the space of a few
days, compared with a normal rate of a few people a day.
Those chosen for tests will be kept in isolation at the
company's facilities until they are no longer infectious, usually
around two weeks, to mitigate the risk of them spreading the
disease to friends and family.
Jamie Spicer-Lewis, a 32-year-old graphic designer and animator
who lives in Birmingham, England, signed up this week after seeing
an ad online while searching for information about coronavirus.
"It's not much time out of my life and if it goes toward helping
in any possible way -- because there are people who are a lot more
at risk than I am -- then why not?" he said. The financial
incentive was a "nice little cherry on top." He said he had
previously donated stem cells for blood cancer patients, a
procedure that involved a three-day hospital stay, without any
payment.
If chosen, he will undergo a battery of extra medical screening
before joining any tests.
Still, studies using other coronaviruses may not give a good
read on vaccines that specifically target the strain that causes
Covid-19, said Matthew Memoli, director of the Laboratory of
Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md.
The most advanced vaccines under development are specific to the
new coronavirus, he said. Several groups, including Moderna Inc.,
Sanofi SA and Johnson & Johnson are working on new
vaccines.
J&J said it isn't planning to use human viral challenge
tests, while Sanofi said it hasn't yet finalized its plans but
wouldn't use a test not specific to Covid-19. The National
Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease, which is running the
trials for Moderna's vaccine, said it didn't have plans to conduct
infection challenge tests.
But challenge tests could be valuable in eventually developing a
universal vaccine that works across the coronavirus family, Dr.
Memoli said. He is developing his own challenge test for
coronavirus using a related strain and hopes it will help
scientists better understand how the viruses behave and inform
longer-term development of treatments or vaccines.
In general, deliberate infection treads a fine ethical line and
is only considered acceptable when the benefits to the wider
population far outweigh the risks to participants.
For instance, ethicists say it would be difficult to justify a
challenge study for a disease like Ebola because of its high death
rate -- about 50% on average compared with 2% to 3% so far for
Covid-19.
When challenge studies have previously been used for more
serious illnesses such as dengue fever and malaria, only
participants deemed to be at low risk from serious illness or death
were selected, and in some cases a weakened version of the pathogen
was used.
"There's a positive ethical rationale for doing challenge study
experiments," said Julian Savulescu, who leads research on
collective responsibility in infectious disease at the University
of Oxford. "This kind of research is one of the arrows in the
quiver of tackling this kind of catastrophe."
Write to Denise Roland at Denise.Roland@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 19, 2020 07:14 ET (11:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Johnson and Johnson (NYSE:JNJ)
Historical Stock Chart
From Aug 2024 to Sep 2024
Johnson and Johnson (NYSE:JNJ)
Historical Stock Chart
From Sep 2023 to Sep 2024