Jahnavi Sarma
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Written By: Jahnavi Sarma | Updated : September 25, 2020 2:55 PM IST
The challenge trial has the potential to save thousands of lives and really bring the world out of the pandemic sooner.
The COVID-19 pandemic has ravaged the world for almost a year now. Scientists have developed vaccines. Many are now in the final stages of trials and hopes of an effective cure seem to be high among the scientific community. But many experts still question the efficacy of the vaccines that are being developed. This may be because there is, as yet, not proper understanding of the virus that causes this deadly disease. No vaccine may be able to provide 100 per cent immunity against the virus. Many scientists feel that injecting people with the live virus may help in testing possible vaccine. The idea is to expose participants to the SARS-CoV-2 virus infection in an attempt to study diseases and test vaccines, or treatments.
This is not a new thing and in April too volunteers had signed up for the 'COVID-19 Human Challenge trial. The UK could be the first country in the world to carry out COVID 'challenge trials', where healthy volunteers would be deliberately infected with coronavirus to test possible vaccines, a report said. According to the BBC, the UK government said that it was holding discussions about developing a vaccine through such "human challenge studies". No contracts have yet been signed.
Alastair Fraser-Urquhart, an 18-year old university student, is planning to volunteer for the trial if it is given the green light to go ahead. "I think the challenge trial has the potential to save thousands of lives and really bring the world out of the pandemic sooner. It is just something that made instant sense to me," AFraser-Urquhart was quoted as saying in the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. Speaking on the same programme, Peter Horby, professor at the Oxford University, said that he thought the trial is a good idea with real potential to advance science and get a better understanding of the disease.
Horby said that it is likely that the volunteers would be observed very closely, and their immune systems would be monitored to see how they respond to the virus. There are -- perhaps surprisingly -- lots of young and healthy people ready to volunteer for the coronavirus challenge trials. It would be a way of finding out, almost immediately, whether a vaccine works. And it could help speed the selection of the promising coronavirus vaccines. According to the report, the health of the volunteers would be monitored round the clock at a clinical research facility in London.
Developing a vaccine is not an easy process and it involves multiple stages of testing. It is first tested on animals to see if it is safe and whether it may trigger an immune response. Then it is tested on a small group of people. If the results are positive, it is then tested on a larger group of people. This is phase 2 clinical trial. After this, testing progresses to phase 3 trials where the vaccine is tested on thousands of people. Researchers look for risk of infection and side effects between those receiving the vaccine and those administered a placebo. It is only after carefully studying the results is a vaccine is considered safe for widespread use. Then the process moves on to the stage of human trials where participants are exposed to the pathogen under highly controlled conditions.
(With inputs from IANS)
