Displaying items by tag: science and technology

Professor Sarah Gilbert, the world-renowned expert leading Oxford University’s team devising a vaccine, told MPs that it would provide ‘a good duration of immunity for several years at least, and probably be better than naturally-acquired immunity.’ Asked for a timeline on the vaccine amid concerns of facing the winter without one, she said, ‘I hope we can improve on those timelines and come to the rescue.’ 8,000 Britons are in a major trial of the Oxford vaccine, and an experimental vaccine is being tested by a German partner. These trials showed encouraging early results, producing neutralising antibodies between 1.8 and 2.8 times greater than those of recovered patients. The key question is whether the vaccine will protect people from becoming infected, or simply make them less ill. It may also work less well in older people because their immune systems are weaker.

The Science and Technology Committee has decided to monitor reporting of clinical trials by universities, and will question those that don’t improve. Clinical trials are the best way to test whether a medicine is safe and effective. They can involve thousands of people, patients and healthy volunteers, and take years to complete. Results from around half of all clinical trials remain hidden. Trials with negative results are twice as likely to remain unreported as those with positive results. This means that people who make decisions about medicines do not have full information about the benefits and risks of treatments we use every day and can dramatically alter how a drug is perceived, leading to unnecessary spending in the NHS. See