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PHOTOGRAPH BY SURACHETSH, GETTY IMAGES
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By Victoria Jaggard
Would you volunteer to be exposed to a deadly disease in the name of science? That’s what an astounding 26,937 people registered to do when researchers at Imperial College London put out a call for participants in a “challenge trial” to study COVID-19.
Clinical trials that intentionally expose healthy humans to disease have been conducted for decades, Priyanka Runwal reports. These carefully controlled experiments allow scientists to learn more about the pathogen in question and look for pathways toward developing treatments. Of course, there is risk involved, especially for diseases that don’t yet have proven therapies, which makes challenge trials controversial. To date, only two such trials are being conducted anywhere in the world for COVID-19, both in the U.K.
Proponents argue that challenge trials can speed up results, since researchers don’t have to deal with messy real-world data and require fewer participants to get meaningful results.
Between the two COVID-19 trials happening now, experts hope to figure out why some infected people remain asymptomatic and why breakthrough infections happen. One participant didn’t require persuasion. “In my mind, it was an immediate yes,” says Paul Zimmer-Harwood.
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