Oxford vaccine triggers immune response

From The Guardian

Hopes for a vaccine to address the global spread of coronavirus have been raised after Oxford University’s experimental version was revealed to be safe and to generate a strong immune response in the people who volunteered to help trial it.

After intensive research, Prof Sarah Gilbert, from Oxford’s Jenner Institute, said they were more than happy with the first results, which showed good immunity after a single dose of vaccine.

“We’re really pleased that it seems to be behaving just as we thought it would do. We have quite a lot of experience of using this technology to make other vaccines, so we knew what we expected to see, and that’s what we have seen,” she told the Guardian.

Gilbert and her colleagues, who once said they could have a vaccine by September, will not predict when it might be available. “None of us have [has] a crystal ball,” she said. The lockdown that began in the UK in late March drastically cut the amount of coronavirus in circulation, which saved lives but also made it difficult to trial vaccines.

The results were “a really important milestone” on the path to a vaccine, said the study’s lead author, Prof Andrew Pollard. They showed the vaccine was very well tolerated, he added. “We are seeing exactly the sort of immune responses we were hoping for, including neutralising antibodies and T-cell responses, which, at least from what we’ve seen in the animal studies, seem to be those that are associated with protection.”

The problem is, he said: “We just don’t know what level is needed if you meet this virus in the wild, to provide protection, so we need to do the clinical trials and to work that out.”  "Hopefully researchers would find out from the trials to come," added Pollard, which would help all vaccine developers.

“We don’t know what high is. We’ve got immune responses that we can measure, we can see the virus being neutralised when the antibodies are tested in the laboratory, but we don’t know how much is needed. I mean it’s encouraging but it’s only the first milestone on this long path,” he said.

Ideally the vaccine would protect against any infection, but scientists already accept it may reduce the severity of the disease instead, meaning people would be less likely to become very sick and die.

The results published on Monday of a study involving more than 1,000 healthy volunteers – half of which had the vaccine while the other half were given a meningitis vaccine – in the Lancet medical journal are preliminary. The effect of the vaccine was measured by the amount of antibodies and T-cells it generates in the blood of the volunteers – not in any response to the virus itself.

Large-scale trials have begun in Brazil and South Africa, however, where infection rates are still high and it will be possible to assess whether vaccinated individuals are less likely to get Covid-19 than others.

[Read more here]


A vaccine would allow life to return to "normal", but my guess is it won't be ready until the end of the year, and after that, it will likely only be available in rich countries.  We're not going to see "normality" for a while yet. 

Trial samples are handled inside the Oxford Vaccine Group laboratory at Oxford University. Photograph: John Cairns/AP