£20m fund to boost vaccination trials in fight against virus

VACCINATION TRIALS are among a group of coronavirus research projects to be boosted by millions of pounds of government funding.

A total of six projects will share part of a £20m fund made available to speed up the response to the Covid-19 outbreak. Business Secretary Alok Sharma announced the recipients of the first round of funding yesterday.

Two of the Governmentbacked projects aim to enable preclinical testing and clinical vaccine trials as well as help researchers develop manufacturing processes to produce a vaccine at a million-dose scale.

Other projects cover testing existing drugs against Covid-19, developing antibodies to target the disease and collecting patient data to answer urgent questions about it.

Mr Sharma said: “UK scientists and researchers have been working tirelessly on the development of treatments for coronavirus.

“The projects we are funding today will be vital in our work to support our valuable NHS and protect people’s lives.”

Some £2.2m of funding will go to a team lead by Prof Sarah Gilbert from the University of Oxford

who are already developing a new Covid-19 vaccine.

Elsewhere, £4.9m of funding will go to work under Dr Kenneth Baillie of the University of Edinburgh, Prof Peter Openshaw at Imperial College London and Prof Calum Semple from the University of Liverpool. Their project will recruit 1,300 UK coronavirus patients and collect samples and data to answer questions on how it affects people.

Another project to benefit is research under Prof Xiao-Ning Xu from Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, Imperial College London, that will receive £600,000 for work on developing antibodies to target the disease.