A Covid-19 vaccine trial at Britain’s Oxford University is starting to show some positive results.
Now the challenge is replicating the promising outcomes shown in monkeys, in human trials.
The study is small but the results are promising. Six rhesus monkeys were given a single dose of the vaccine.
Fourteen days later, some of them developed protective antibodies against Covid-19. Twenty-eight days later, all of them did.
The monkeys were then exposed to high levels of the virus, and the vaccine kept the virus from replicating in the lungs and appeared to prevent damage to them.
And injecting the vaccine, which contains a weakened version of the virus, did not cause Covid-19 to form in the monkeys.
Of that, $8 billion will go towards vaccine development. (Source: Other)
“What we’ve seen so far is it works just as we would hope for and it works nicely,” says Dr Stephen Evans, professor ofpharmacoepidemiology at London’s school of hygiene and tropical medicine.
Success in monkeys is a key hurdle. They share so much of our DNA, but many vaccines that protect monkeys fail in humans.
Human trials began last month with more than 1000 volunteers injected so far.
The Oxford researchers say they hope to see signs the vaccine is working in humans in just a few weeks, but even if everything is successful it will be months before they can roll out a vaccine.
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