U.K. Preparing COVID-19 Vaccine Trials That Deliberately Expose Study Subjects

The study is still awaiting final regulatory approval. If given the green light, a study in which human volunteers will be infected with the coronavirus will begin in January at a biosecure unit at London's Royal Free Hospital.

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Updated at 9:00 a.m. ET

Researchers in Britain are preparing to start a controversial COVID-19 "human challenge" study in which dozens of healthy volunteers will be exposed to live coronavirus in an effort to speed up vaccine development.

The Human Challenge Programme will be conducted by Imperial College London, which said Tuesday in a statement that it would be working in cooperation with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, and hVIVO, a clinical company that has worked on viral human challenge models.

The U.K. government is preparing to invest $43.4 million (33.6 million pounds) in the study, which is the first of its kind involving the coronavirus.

The plan is to recruit healthy people between the ages of 18 and 30 with no prior history of COVID-19 symptoms and no known risk factors for the disease. Researchers would inoculate them with a candidate vaccine, then test its effectiveness by deliberately exposing them to live coronavirus.

The study is still awaiting final regulatory approval. If it is given the green light, it will begin in January at a biosecure unit at London's Royal Free Hospital. Volunteers will be quarantined in the facility and receive a laboratory-grown SARS-CoV-2 strain as part of the trial. They will be monitored around the clock for a few weeks.