Testing new treatments and vaccines can take years, if not decades, to produce the necessary data, so researchers are turning to a controversial approach that involves deliberately infecting volunteers with potentially fatal viruses, parasites and bacteria, reports. BBC.
A group of young adults are waiting to be ‘attacked’ by mosquitoes carrying a parasite that kills 600,000 people a year.
Volunteers have agreed to be part of a medical trial at Oxford University’s Jenner Institute to test a new malaria vaccine.
The study took place in 2017, but the institute has been conducting such experiments with mosquitoes since 2001.
The researchers hope that the vaccine given to the volunteers will give them enough protection against the parasite to prevent them from getting malaria.
These tests fall under the category of controlled human infection clinical trials – tests where a volunteer is deliberately exposed to disease-causing pathogens.
Although it is dangerous, perhaps even reckless, to expose a person to a potentially fatal disease, it is a procedure that has become increasingly popular in medical research. in recent decades. It is also a method that gives results.
Volunteers will develop more and more diseases to develop vaccines and treatments
The R21 vaccine was later shown to prevent malaria with 80% efficacy and became the second malaria vaccine in history recommended by World Health Organization (WHO).
The first doses of the vaccine were given to newborns in Ivory Coast and South Sudan, countries where thousands of people die every year from malaria.
Now, scientists are looking to give more and more types of disease to volunteers in the hope that they can develop increasingly effective vaccines and treatments.
Pathogens such as Zika, typhus and cholera have already been used in human experiments. Other viruses, such as hepatitis C, have been selected for possible studies in the near future.
The Jenner Institute estimates that these tests have contributed to the production of at least 12 vaccines over the past two decades. At least 308 trials in which participants were exposed to live pathogens were conducted between 1980 and 2021.
Supporters of the method say that the benefits obtained from these studies justify the risks that volunteers are exposed to, if the tests are carried out under the appropriate conditions.
However, some scientists are concerned about the speed at which these tests, which were considered taboo in the not too distant past, are taking place.
The dark history of medical experiments – from Nazi Germany to the USA
The history of medical research has its fair share of dark times. The most famous experiments were those carried out by Nazi scientists who used concentration camp prisoners who were infected against their will with tuberculosis and other pathogens.
Other less well-known experiments are, for example, those of American doctors in Guatemala, who in the mid-1940s took 1,308 people with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases.
In the early 1970s, it was discovered that doctors at Willowbrook State School in New York had exposed more than 50 disabled children to hepatitis between the 1950s and 1960s in an attempt to create a vaccine.
These examples have added to the wave of criticism directed against the idea of infecting humans with pathogens. And yet, as medical ethics have worsened and despite the growing threat of pandemics, some scientists are willing to turn to the model of controlled human disease.
“It is better to learn that a vaccine causes problems in a setting where there is intensive observation and medical care than to learn that in a part of the world where resources are limited,” said Andrea Cox, professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
Traditional medical research can take many years before an effective vaccine is found. For Cox, human trials provide the best results: less time is wasted, money is saved and many lives are saved.
A volunteer received $6,400 for being infected with Covid-19
Some scientists worry, however, that ethical red lines will become blurred once experiments involve diseases for which there is no treatment.
In 2022, US researchers caught 20 healthy women with two strains of the Zika virus – none of them were pregnant or breastfeeding.
There is no treatment for this virus that causes mild symptoms in adults but can cause birth defects in babies born after the mother is infected with Zika during pregnancy. In some rare cases, brain problems can also occur in adults.
There have been even more controversial discussions about including HIV in human trials, although there are no concrete plans to conduct such studies in the near future.
In 2021, 36 young adults were exposed to Covid-19 via a nasal spray, then quarantined for 14 days in a London hospital.
Since then, many other such experiments have appeared. Volunteers participating in a study who become infected with the Omicron BA.5 variant of Covid-19 will receive $6,400
Sean Cousins, a 33-year-old midfielder from Southampton, received just over $14,000 to take part in three tests between 2014 and 2020.
In two of them, Cousins was infected with the flu, and in the third with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Cousins says he would have volunteered even if he wasn’t getting paid.
“It was something new to try. I wanted to give some of my time and help humanity if I could,” Cousins said.
More and more tests like this will appear in the future. The list of pathogens will also grow to include viruses, bacteria and parasites that can be dangerous and have no treatment.
“I think we’re going to push the limits, and we’re not going to stop until someone gets hurt,” said Daniel Sulmasy, director of Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute for Ethics.
Others believe that human trials offer great medical opportunities and argue that, given the right conditions, these clinical trials could help develop vaccines for diseases that have long been vexed. on mankind for centuries faster and more efficiently.
Editor: Raul Netoiu
2024-08-29 04:00:47
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