Scientists in the UK ask for volunteers to trial Coronavirus vaccine

Imperial College London NHS Trust is advertising for volunteers to take part in a coronavirus vaccine trial with researchers at Oxford also starting a new trial.

THE trial will take place at four sites across the UK – Bristol, Thames Valley, Southampton, and London. The researchers explain on the trial website that: “The purpose of this study is to test a new vaccine against Covid-19 in healthy volunteers.

“This study will enable us to assess if healthy people can be protected from Covid-19 with this new vaccine called ChAdOx1 nCoV-19. “It will also give us valuable information on safety aspects of the vaccine and its ability to generate good immune responses against the virus.

“We will do this by randomly allocating participants to receive the Covid-19 vaccine or a control injection in addition to doing blood tests and collecting information about any symptoms that occur after vaccination.”

The researchers explained: The trial will last for six months, “During this study, we will recruit a total of 1,112 volunteers, of which up to 561 will be vaccinated with the candidate vaccine ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, and up to 551 will be vaccinated with a control vaccine. Volunteers will be blinded to what group they are in.”

The Oxford Trial

The vaccine, developed by experts at the University of Oxford, is made up from a weakened version of a common cold virus called the adenovirus, taken from chimpanzees. The adenovirus has been genetically altered so that it can’t replicate and grow in humans, according to the statement.

The researchers also combined the candidate vaccine with genes that code for the so-called ‘spike’ proteins that the coronavirus uses to infect human cells.