Oxford COVID-19 Vaccine Begins Phase II, Successful Vaccine Ready Soon?

Researchers at Oxford University who are working on a COVID-19 vaccine now want to recruit more than 10,000 healthy participants for the next phases of the human clinical trials.

Phase II will concentrate on expanding the participants’ age range while Phase III will examine the effect of the vaccine on people from 18 years old and older.

The Oxford vaccine is one of the few vaccines that are being developed to find a cure for COVID-19.

The first phase of the trial began back in April with more than 1,000 healthy adult participants. Follow-ups of Phase I are still ongoing.

Phase II will have 10,260 adults and children whose ages are from 5 to over 70 years old. This is to help the researchers better understand how the vaccine works on people with a broad range of ages. The immune response of these volunteers will be accessed closely.

In the third phase, the researchers will study the response of the vaccine in people over 18. This will assess how the vaccine functions in preventing people from being infected with COVID-19.

The process will be randomized, which means in Phase II and Phase III, the researchers will randomly select adult participants to receive one or two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine or a licensed vaccine that will be used for comparison.

ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, the vaccine of Oxford, is made using a weakened version of adenovirus (a common cold virus) causing infections in chimpanzees. The virus has been genetically modified so that it won’t infect humans.

Head of the Oxford Vaccine Group, Prof. Andrew Pollard, said that the clinical studies were progressing really well.

The Oxford team is working with AstraZeneca, a biopharmaceutical company, in developing the vaccine.

The vaccine is an achievement from the ceaseless effort and hard work of Sarah Catherine Gilbert. Sarah is a vaccinologist and a vaccinology professor at Oxford University. Her team of researchers is racing to find the answer to end the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the moment, there are at least 70 vaccines that are being developed to fight COVID-19. But the one that Sarah Gilbert and her team are working on is the most potential one. If everything goes well, the vaccine could be available by September this year.

>>> Results Of Oxford COVID-19 Vaccine’s Human Trials Will Come Out By June