UK scientists handed £20m for the battle against virus
A HUge push to find a vaccine or drug for coronavirus has been given £20million of public money.
UK scientists will examine patients to try to understand who is most at risk of severe illness and how it is fought off.
they will also investigate how long victims are infectious for and why the virus spreads.
the first patients have already been enrolled on a trial to see whether an HiV drug and lowdose steroids work. And a vaccine will be tested by a team at the University of Oxford.
these are among six research projects that Business Secretary Alok Sharma announced yesterday will benefit from a £20million funding pot.
mr Sharma said: ‘Whether testing new drugs or examining how to repurpose existing ones, UK scienresearchers tists and researchers have been working tirelessly on the development of treatments.
‘the projects we are funding today will be vital in our work to support our valuable nHS and protect people’s lives.’
the race to test the first vaccine was won by the Kaiser permanente Washington Health research institute in Seattle.
But the Oxford team, which has been given £2.2million, has developed a vaccine from a harmless virus altered to produce the ‘spike protein’ on Covid-19.
the vaccine, which primes the immune system to recognise and attack the virus, will be tested first on adults under 50 and then older people and children.
A second team at Oxford, which has been given £400,000, is working on mass-manufacturing vaccines so they can be made available to the most vulnerable people as fast as possible. at imperial College London and the universities of edinburgh and Liverpool are collecting biological samples and data from patients with coronavirus to better understand – and control – the outbreak. they will recruit at least 1,300 victims to look at whether they can be infected with other viruses like flu at the same time, how long they are infectious for and how best to diagnose the illness.
the team, which has received £4.9million, also wants to understand how the immune system fights the virus.
the University of Oxford will also be given £2.1million for a clinical trial to see which drugs help coronavirus patients in hospital.
they will test a drug for HiV called lopinavir-ritonavir and lowdose corticosteroid drugs, with the aim of finding a treatment within three months.
At the same time researchers at the University of Belfast, who have been given £300,000, will test 1,000 potential drugs on human cells to see if they can stop the virus spreading and causing dangerous inflammation.
imperial College London will develop antibodies that could block coronavirus and instruct the immune system to destroy it.
the announcement follows the establishment of a Covid-19 genomics UK Consortium that will take samples from coronavirus patients and analyse their genetic code to unlock how the disease works.
the consortium, including the nHS and Wellcome Sanger institute, will provide its results to hospitals at the frontline of the fight against the virus.
Health Secretary matt Hancock said a new bedside test for coronavirus has been invented that does not need to be sent to the lab. Latest coronavirus video news, views and expert advice at mailplus.co.uk/coronavirus
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