105 - The Challenge of Vaccine Challenge Trials for COVID-19

Public Health On Call

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

News, Health & Fitness, Medicine

4.6 • 644 Ratings

🗓️ 30 June 2020

⏱️ 17 minutes

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Summary

Vaccine challenge trials, in which healthy volunteers are infected with a pathogen to determine whether a vaccine works, can be done faster and with fewer participants than traditional efficacy studies. But there are downsides: challenge trials require young, healthy participants which may not help produce a vaccine that would protect older populations at risk for severe COVID-19 disease. There are also serious ethical considerations. Volunteers would be infected with a virus for which there is no cure, and so much is still unknown about why this coronavirus can cause severe disease in people without any known risk factors. Johns Hopkins vaccine researcher Dr. Anna Durbin talks with Stephanie Desmon about this method of getting to a COVID-19 vaccine, her experience with a dengue challenge trial, and what we know so far about whether COVID-19 antibodies confer immunity.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Public Health On Call, a new podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
0:12.7	Our focus is the novel coronavirus.
0:15.2	I'm Josh Sharfstein, a faculty member at Johns Hopkins, and also a former secretary of Maryland's health department.
0:21.6	Our goal with this podcast is to bring evidence and experts to help you understand today's
0:26.9	news about the novel coronavirus and what it means for tomorrow.
0:30.5	If you have questions, you can email them to public health question at jhh.edu.
0:36.3	That's public health question at jh.hh.edu for future podcast episodes.
0:42.6	Today, Stephanie Desmond speaks with Dr. Anna Durbin, a vaccine expert at the Johns Hopkins
0:48.9	Bloomberg School of Public Health.
0:50.8	They discuss the logistics and ethics behind so-called challenge trials, a controversial
0:56.7	method of testing a vaccine that would expose healthy volunteers to the pathogen to see if
1:02.4	the vaccine works. Let's listen.
1:04.6	Anna Durbin, thank you so much for joining me.
1:07.2	Oh, you're very welcome. It's my pleasure.
1:09.3	So today we're going to talk about something called
1:11.2	a challenge trial, which can be done as part of testing vaccine candidates. And I'm wondering
1:20.3	if you could explain to us what that means. Sure. So what a challenge child means is that we're
1:27.3	actually giving the virus or the bacteria
1:31.8	the pathogen to normal, healthy people to see how they respond to it. And we do those,
1:38.9	those challenged trials have been done for different diseases, mostly, as you said, in the context of vaccine trials.
1:46.4	So we do those for vaccine trials for a couple of reasons.
1:52.3	One might be, for instance, that there isn't a vaccine available for anyone, but the disease
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