Coronavirus Drug and Vaccine Studies Are Recruiting Their First Volunteers

This study, says Kalil, is also designed to be more flexible than most drug trials. “This is not just a remdesivir trial,” he says. “It will test as many [COVID-19] therapies as possible, and remdesivir is just the first. Let’s say a couple of months from now, we realize that remdesivir is a good drug, that it works better than placebo…. Then patients receiving the placebo would be offered the drug and we would move on to test another drug. If remdesivir turns out not to be effective, then we would remove it from the study and bring another drug to test against placebo. It’s a dynamic, fast way to run a randomized trial.” The design is a way to accelerate testing of antiviral drugs against COVID-19, since infections are on-going and there is no treatment yet. Meanwhile, other labs are working on developing vaccines that would provide some protection against the virus in the first place. The vaccine study that is furthest along (and which is also overseen by NIAID) is currently recruiting its first participants at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute. Unlike the remdesivir trial, this study will enroll healthy volunteers. Dr. Lisa Jackson, lead investigator on the study, says 45 healthy people will be recruited to test three different doses of the vaccine. Kaiser is currently getting thousands of daily online requests from people interested in participating. Researchers are contacting the volunteers by phone to asses...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Infectious Disease Source Type: news