UKC

"During this study, we will recruit a total of 510 volunteers, of which 260 will be vaccinated with the candidate vaccine ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, and 250 will be vaccinated with a placebo vaccine."

You must:
    • Be aged 18-55 years old
    • Be in good health
    • Be based in the Thames Valley area

https://covid19vaccinetrial.web.ox.ac.uk/volunteer

Bump

Presumably confident of enough volunteers in the Thames Valley, or I’d do it.

That’s insanely quick identification of potentially the right degradation products to act as the adjuvant, GMP manufacturing, preclinical testing and regulatory approval.

like insanely quick.

The drug and medical device product developer in me screams when I see these things at the moment.

So quick that it can’t possibly have been possible to do preclinical trials on mammals?  I haven’t looked into this vaccine but the previous one I looked into was a modification from an older one that had had sucesfull preclinical trials, and this was used to justify skipping the PCT step on the derivative.

It all makes me really rather nervous, especially considering that under-specific immune over response is a part of the lethality of Covid.

Nervous for the participants of the trial?

Nervous both for the participants and for the wider consequences for pharma if it goes wrong.  

I am not involved in immune or virology work so I’m a layperson (armchair expert in UKC parlance) but I do work on a novel pre clinical technology.  

Can't help but feel you're not taking this social distancing thing seriously enough.

Ha!

Sorry...I just read the title as Vaccine Trail......Thames Valley. Well it is April 1st.

Presumably the proposal is to then check for the presence of antibodies to the Covid19 virus? It seems unethical to infect people with the real thing to see if it works...

Perhaps that's why it's Thames Valley only, you don't need to expose them, they'll be exposed soon enough anyway.

jk

My partner's daughter is a chief problem solver/trouble-shooter for a company in the North of England and she is doing live tests on humans to come up with a vaccine.

Incidentally, she is supposed to be working from home as her partner is in the middle of chemotherapy so she is going in to work at 3.00am until 8.00am to reduce contact and then working from home. 

It is a bit quick, but does say they're developing a vaccine for MERS, so presumably a lot of the preliminary work has already been done.