While the rest of the world is trying to stamp out the Covid-19 Delta variant, British researchers are making progress growing a carefully controlled batch in a lab that they hope to use to infect volunteers in studies.
The effort marks a new phase in the U.K.’s human challenge trials, the only Covid-19 studies in the world intentionally exposing participants to the virus with the goal of developing new vaccines and treatments. Other researchers are also isolating and growing Covid variant specimens for study. U.S. government-funded scientists are producing variants for research, but not for use in humans, a National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases official said.
With colleagues in the Netherlands, hVivo has coaxed the Delta strain to mature through the seed stage, said Andrew Catchpole, hVivo’s chief scientific officer and a virologist, who oversees the virus manufacturing. The London clinical-research firm is continuing to grow the batch milliliter by milliliter from a specimen taken from an infected human.
Open Orphan (LON:ORPH) was founded in 2017, with the goal of rapidly building Europe’s leading pharma services company by a management team with extensive industry and financial expertise. The company comprises of two commercial specialist CRO services businesses (Venn Life Sciences and hVIVO) and is also developing a genomics data platform business (Genomic Health Data).
