As the deadly coronavirus is gripping the world at a fast pace, the scientists have decided against testing the vaccine on animals and will proceed with the human trials of it within days, shunning a routine practice.
“I don’t think proving this in an animal model is on the critical path to getting this to a clinical trial,” said Tal Zaks, chief medical officer at Moderna, a Cambridge, Mass.-based biotech that has produced a Covid-19 vaccine candidate at record speed.
He told STAT that scientists at the National Institutes of Health are “working on nonclinical research in parallel.” Meanwhile, the clinical trial started recruiting healthy participants in the first week of March.
That isn’t how vaccine testing normally happens. Regulators require that a manufacturer show a product is safe before it goes into people, and while it isn’t enshrined in law, researchers almost always check that a new concoction is effective in lab animals before putting human volunteers at potential risk.
Meanwhile, the development came as scientists in Britain said a vaccine could be tested on humans by June after encouraging results on mice.
Scientists from Imperial College London said that clinical trials could take place in a few months’ time if they receive funding, after trials on mice gave promising results.
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“Currently we have a prototype vaccine in animal models where the early results are encouraging,” Dr Robin Shattock told a British media outlet.
“We are hoping to progress to clinical testing by the summer depending on obtaining sufficient funds for the next stage,” said the head of mucosal infection and immunity at the Department of Infectious Disease.
A number of researchers across the globe are working to develop a vaccine for the Covid-19 pandemic, which has infected more than 145,000 people across the globe.
