Human infection challenge trial(s) for covid-19 vaccine likely to start in UK in January

 The Financial Times has the story:

UK to test vaccines on volunteers deliberately infected with Covid-19--‘Human challenge trials’ intended to accelerate vaccine development programmes   by  Clive Cookson.

"London is to host the world’s first Covid-19 human challenge trials — in which healthy volunteers are deliberately infected with coronavirus to assess the effectiveness of experimental vaccines.

"The UK government-funded studies are expected to begin in January ...

"The researchers, who did not want to comment publicly ahead of the launch, said the trials would play a vital role in narrowing the large field of promising Covid-19 vaccines likely to move into clinical testing early next year.

"Volunteers will be inoculated with a vaccine and a month or so later receive a “challenge” dose of Sars-Cov-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, under controlled conditions."

"About 2,000 potential volunteers have signed up for challenge studies in the UK through the US-based advocacy group 1Day Sooner, which campaigns for Covid-19 infection trials and has enlisted 37,000 people worldwide. Traditional clinical trials need tens of thousands of participants and researchers would struggle to attract enough for multiple vaccine studies."