Israel will begin its first clinical trials of an innovative vaccine against the new coronavirus on November 1, authorities said on Sunday, trying to stem the second wave of contamination.
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At the very start of the pandemic, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commissioned the Institute for Biological Research (IIBR), a public research institute, to develop a local vaccine against the virus which has now claimed more than one million lives. around the world, including 2,372 in Israel, a country that has recorded more than 300,000 cases.
On Sunday, authorities announced that the first clinical trials of this potential vaccine dubbed "BriLife", a mixture of the words "Briout" (health in Hebrew) and "life" and between the two the initials "IL" Israel, were to begin on November 1.
The World Health Organization (WHO) currently lists around 40 “vaccine candidates” evaluated in clinical trials on humans around the world (compared to 11 in mid-June).
Ten are at the most advanced stage, phase 3, where the effectiveness of the vaccine is measured on a large scale on tens of thousands of volunteers spread over several continents.
There are different approaches, based either on proven vaccine categories or on more innovative techniques, such as the viral vector vaccine (VRV) where researchers use another virus as a carrier that is transformed and adapted to fight Covid disease. -19.
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In the Israeli case, the laboratories of the Institute for Biological Research produced a VRV-like vaccine that induced an "
effective immune response
" in small animals such as mice, hamsters and rabbits and larger animals such as rabbits. pigs, said Dr. Shmuel Shapira, director of the IIBR.
On November 1, the laboratory will begin the first phase of clinical trials on two volunteers aged between 18 and 55, appointed by Sheba and Hadassa hospitals, Shapira said.
According to the first responses, the authorities will go from two to 80 guinea pigs to complete the first phase, then in December to 980 for the second phase and finally to 25,000 guinea pigs for the third, and last, phase of clinical tests scheduled for around April or May.
So far 25,000 doses have been produced with the project to eventually increase production to 15 million doses, a number greater than the country's population (9 million inhabitants).