As coronavirus pandemic continues to wreak havoc across the world, countries are now looking for sure shot solutions, as a result the trial to develop a vaccine has begun.?
The race to develop an effective vaccine against the novel coronavirus gathered pace this week, as clinical trials on humans were approved in Germany and launched in the UK.
And yesterday, first human trial got underway in UK after first patients were injected with the vaccine developed by Oxford University.?
Two volunteers were injected, the first of more than 800 people recruited for the study.
Half will receive the Covid-19 vaccine, and half a control vaccine which protects against meningitis but not coronavirus.
How does the vaccine work?
Oxford's potential vaccine is designed to protect healthy individuals from catching the disease.?
The vaccine contains a weakened version of a virus that causes the common cold in chimpanzees. They then combined this virus called the adenovirus with a coronavirus protein called spike protein.?
"This vaccine aims to turn the virus' most potent weapon, its spikes, against it — raising antibodies that stick to them allowing the immune system to lock onto and destroy the virus," Saul Faust, the director of the National Institute for Health Research's Southampton Clinical Research Facility at the University Hospital Southampton, said in the statement.? ?
When will they know if it really works?
According to the report in BBC, the only way it will be known if the Covid-19 vaccine works is by comparing the number of people who get infected with coronavirus in the months ahead from the two arms of the trial.
There could be a setback if cases fall drastically in the UK, because there may not be enough data.
Prof Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, who is leading the trial, told BBC, "We're chasing the end of this current epidemic wave. If we don't catch that, we won't be able to tell whether the vaccine works in the next few months. But we do expect that there will be more cases in the future because this virus hasn't gone away."
A larger trial of almost 5,000 volunteers is expected to start in the coming months and will have no age limit.??
Coronavirus has?infected more than 2.7 million people?and killed at least 190,000 worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University.