March 27, 2020

expert reaction to Oxford COVID-19 vaccine programme opening to start screening healthy volunteers for clinical trial recruitment

The University of Oxford has announced that their COVID-19 vaccine programme is opening to start screening healthy volunteers for clinical trial recruitment.

Dr Doug Brown, Chief Executive of the British Society for Immunology, said:

“It’s fantastic to see the research team at the University of Oxford get this trial up and running in record time.  The UK leads the world for the quality of our immunology research and this is another great example of how the community has come together to drive forward scientific discovery into this pandemic.

“This trial is without doubt a huge step forwards in our attempts to find a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, but we should remember that we can only speed up the research effort by so much.  This vaccine candidate still needs to go through many stages of testing to ensure that it is both safe and effective for widescale use.  We need to be realistic about the timescale in which this can take place.

“Immunology is a global science.  In the quest to find much needed vaccines and therapeutics against this novel coronavirus, we need to make sure that our research community can continue with international collaboration efforts to speed up development.  This will give us the best chance of developing an effective vaccine and developing it soon.”

Prof Stephen Evans, Professor of Pharmacoepidemiology, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said:

Is this good news?

“Yes in terms of clearly showing that rapid progress has been made.  There are risks that some aspects of pre-human testing have been reduced or omitted, but the benefits of getting the vaccine as quickly as possible could outweigh such potential theoretical risks.

Is this quick work, faster than vaccine trials normally take to start?

“Dramatically quicker.  Partly because some of the work was done for other vaccines, and partly, as noted, some of the pre-human studies have been reduced or omitted.

What will volunteers likely be screened for?

“They want healthy volunteers at this stage rather than people with Covid-19, so they will check general health, what medicines they’re taking (many will be excluded if they are taking medicines e.g. probably exclude those taking blood pressure-lowering drugs), but all these will be explained.  It will probably not be tested on women who could possibly be pregnant, certainly at this early stage.

What is an adenovirus vaccine vector and is that an established type of vaccine?

“Adenovirus vaccines themselves are not in general use; the basic structure has been used, as they say, for a number of diseases including HIV, TB and Malaria as well as using the structure to deliver gene therapy in cystic fibrosis and cancer.  None is in any routine immunisation programme, but they have been used in the UK, but not widely.  The same type of structure was used in some attempts to have SARS (1) or MERS but the epidemics ceased before they could be fully tested.  Using an adenovirus vaccine vector is a way to get the antigen (not the virus itself) into people so that their own immune system generates a defence against SARS Cov-2.  Having the general structure (platform) already means that some of the safety issues around that will have been studied carefully, to try and ensure that the risk to anyone taking the vaccine is as low as possible.  It is having this previous knowledge, that took a long time to gain, that enables this new vaccine to be brought to a clinical trial earlier.  It is like building the vaccine out of Lego bricks and having the central key bit exchanged for a different key bit, but lots of the overall structure of the vaccine is the same as one that has been tested previously.

“There are different possible ways of getting a new vaccine and this is just one of the possible approaches.”

Prof Adam Finn, Professor of Paediatrics, University of Bristol, said:

“The Oxford group are sensibly lining things up early to enable them to get going on human trials as soon as they have the vaccine and the go ahead to use it.

“Trials like this usually start in healthy adult volunteers who are unlikely to fall ill during the trial with other diseases.

“This will make it easier to see whether the vaccine is safe and does not cause unexpected side-effects.  That will be their main aim at this stage.

“Adenoviral vector vaccines of this kind, designed to prevent several different infections, have been studied in human trials before but have not yet been licensed and put into widespread use.

“If this vaccine is shown to be safe and effective and is licensed, it will be the first time this vaccine technology has gone that far forward.

“It will be important that several different types of vaccine are developed in the same way in parallel to maximise the chances that at least one of them reaches the finishing line and goes into use.”

https://covid19vaccinetrial.co.uk/press-release-trial-open

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:

www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19/

Declared interests

Prof Stephen Evans: “No conflicts of interest.”

Prof Adam Finn: “No conflicts of interest to declare.”

None others received.