Oxford vaccine trials in Brazil and South Africa

Across the globe, more than 125 potential Covid vaccines are currently in pre-clinical trials. Surely we’ll strike it rich with one of them. And we’re going great guns with two research teams here in the UK, at Oxford University and Imperial College London. Elisabeth Mahase brings us up to date in the BMJ...

She says that to move as fast as possible the Oxford University team has begun testing its vaccine in many countries around the world.

Sarah Gilbert, a professor of vaccinology leading the project, said the low levels of transmission in the UK now meant there was “little chance of determining efficacy” in this country. However, so keen are other countries to start trials that Brazil and South Africa have begun, with others to follow suit, including the USA.

“Our problem is knowing where transmission will be in four to six weeks’ time. It’s very difficult to predict, so we are working in multiple settings,” Gilbert told the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee on June 23.

But she added the sooner the developers – or any other team around the world – could get a signal of how effective a vaccine was and the level of immunity it generated, the sooner they could share this information so that other teams could understand whether their vaccines were likely to work.

Gilbert’s team is using a virus that’s had some of its genes removed.

“This means that, although it will infect the person, it cannot spread through the body, so it’s very safe,” she explained.

A team at Imperial College London is making a vaccine which will deliver genetic instructions to muscle cells to make the spike protein on the surface of the coronavirus and create an immune response.

In the past, the development of a vaccine took 10 years or more. Both Oxford and Imperial have compressed that into less than a year by speeding up safety testing, manufacturing and clinical trials.