Home » Posts tagged 'Jenny Strasburg'
Tag Archives: Jenny Strasburg
Researchers Infect Volunteers With Coronavirus, Hoping to Conquer Covid-19 – Wall Street Journal
By Jenny Strasburg Sept. 4, 2021 530 am ET
LONDON—Much of the world spent the past year taking vaccines and wearing masks to evade Covid-19. In the U.K., almost four dozen volunteers have had the virus dripped into their noses by syringe in clinical experiments.
So-called human challenge studies—which intentionally expose healthy people to viruses and other pathogens to study illness, vaccines and treatments—aren’t new. Scientists globally have used them for decades to assess how infections and drugs behave from the moment they enter the body.
But only the U.K. has pushed ahead with Covid-19 challenge trials, deliberately infecting volunteers to study a new, sometimes-deadly disease that still harbors many unknowns.
On March 8, 23-year-old Jacob Hopkins, a U.K. university student, watched researchers enter his quarantine room’s airlocked entrance at London’s Royal Free Hospital. They wheeled a cart carrying a big red box, like a picnic cooler, labeled “biohazard.”
“It’s kind of like that scene from ‘Contagion’—well, any scene from ‘Contagion,’ really—all wearing hazmat suits [with] a little ventilator thing to the side,” he said. He lay on the bed with his head tilted back. A droplet of the coronavirus was inserted into his left nostril, then his right. He stayed there, his nose clipped closed for about another 20 minutes….
….
Planning started in April 2020, led by researchers from the University of Oxford and Imperial College London, officials from the government-appointed U.K. Vaccine Taskforce, and a small London-based biotech called hVivo Services Ltd. that specializes in contract drug testing….
Link here to read the full article
WSJ – Researchers Ready Lab-Grown Covid-19 Delta Variant for Human Trials
U.K. company is growing the highly contagious variant under tight lab controls for use in challenge studies
Scientists have coaxed the Delta strain to mature, said Andrew Catchpole, chief scientiic oficer of trial partner hVivo.
PHOTO: HVIVO SERVICES LIMITED
by Jenny Strasburg – Wall Street Journal
LONDON—While the rest of the world is trying to stamp out the Covid-19 Delta variant, British researchers are making progress growing a carefully controlled batch in a lab that they hope to use to infect volunteers in studies.
The effort marks a new phase in the U.K.’s human challenge trials, the only Covid-19 studies in the world intentionally exposing participants to the virus with the goal of developing new vaccines and treatments. Other researchers are also isolating and growing Covid variant specimens for study. U.S. government-funded scientists are producing variants for research, but not for use in humans, a National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases official said.
Two Covid challenge trials sponsored by Imperial College London and the University of Oxford started earlier this year in the U.K. They so far have exposed more than 40 healthy, young volunteers under isolated medical supervision to the original Wuhan strain that circulated widely in 2020.
Since then, the highly transmissible Delta variant has come to dominate infections globally, rendering vaccines less effective and boosting case numbers across the U.K., U.S. and elsewhere. Delta’s fast rise led researchers and U.K. challenge-trial partner hVivo Services Ltd. to focus on trying to grow the variant in the lab.
Full article here