Jake Hopkins, a university student in the U.K., decided earlier this year to do something most people in the world have been trying to avoid: he volunteered to get Covid-19. Jake signed up for a human challenge trial that intentionally infects participants with the virus. He shares recordings from his experience in the controversial study, and WSJ’s Jenny Strasburg explains the researchers’ goals.
Kate Linebaugh: Last summer, Jake saw an ad calling for volunteers to join a scientific trial. The trial was being run by researchers from Imperial college, London, and a company called hVIVO. They needed people willing to get infected with coronavirus so they could study how the virus affects the body and how the body fights back. This kind of study is called a human challenge trial. And these researchers had put up the ad.
Jake Hopkins: Well, I kind of just clicked on to it. Didn’t really read much into it, and just put my name down almost instantly. It was like, yeah, this sounds interesting. I want to be a part of it, whatever.
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).