Expose yourself to covid infection in a protected context, and wait patiently for SARS-CoV-2 to colonize your respiratory tract: before the arrival of vaccines, those who lent themselves to studies of this type he was called a hero. But now that we have effective vaccines available, do we still need such experiments? One Human Challenge Study, a controlled human infection test, is about to kick off in the UK, after approval by the ethics committee.
In the next few weeks, 90 healthy subjects between the ages of 18 and 30 will first encounter coronavirus in the laboratory, and then presumably develop covid under the watchful eye of doctors.
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Before it’s too late. The experiment will provide valuable information on the early stages of infection and the organism’s response, and will be crucial to refine second-generation vaccines and develop treatments against the new variants. The research stems from a collaboration between the British vaccine task force, Imperial College London, the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust and a medical laboratory, hVIVO, specializing in this type of study. There is not much time: in a few months, if the vaccination campaign goes fast, finding people without antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 could be more complicated.
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What we still don’t know. Some data on covid, impossible to collect outside the laboratory, could help us to prevent infection more effectively or administer more timely treatments: for example, what is the minimum dose of virus necessary to establish infection? What kind of defenses does the immune system initially put in place? Is it possible to predict which of the volunteers will develop the most obvious symptoms?
To answer these questions, after the initial check-ups, the volunteers will expose their noses to doses of the virus in the older, better known and unchanged strain, the one that circulated in March, to spend the next 14 days in quarantine. .
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The next vaccines. We will study how the covid pathogen multiplies in the nose, entrance to the organism, and we will analyze the stages of infection that precede the onset of symptoms. This version of the virus in young, disease-free volunteers poses very low risks and subjects will be followed until complete recovery. In the future, a small additional group will be vaccinated instead and exposed to the new variants, to understand how to optimize second generation vaccines against mutated forms of the virus. This second phase of the experiment has not yet received the green light.
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