After nearly a year of public advocacy and often rancorous ethical debate, human challenge trials for Covid-19 vaccines are getting off the ground in London.
The UK government’s Covid-19 Vaccine Taskforce and the contract research firm Open Orphan announced today a £10 million ($13 million) plan to test experimental Covid-19 vaccines in volunteers who are intentionally exposed to the novel coronavirus.
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).