First two volunteers receive injections in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Human trials to last at least six months.
An Israeli-developed vaccine against COVID-19 began human trials on Sunday, and is scheduled to be available to the public by next summer, pending the results of three phases of tests.
The vaccine is called Brilife and was developed by the Israel Institute for Biological Research over the past several months. Human trials of the vaccine required approval from the Israel Ministry of Health and the Helsinki Committee for Medical Experiments in Humans.
The three phases of the human trials are as follows:
- Injections will be administered to 80 healthy volunteers (starting with two on Sunday, and expanding to the others depending on their reactions). Over the course of the next month or so, those 80 volunteers will be closely monitored to determine if any side effects have occurred and whether antibodies to the virus have appeared.
- In December, the second phase of the trials are set to begin, expanding the number of volunteers to 960. This phase will also be focused on monitoring the safety of the vaccine, as well as determining proper doses, and will last for several months.
- If the second phase goes according to plan, then phase three will begin in April or May of next year. This phase will be a large-scale test of the effectiveness of Brilife on a volunteer pool of 30,000 participants.
Should these trials prove successful, the Israel Institute for Biological Research has reported that it is prepared to immediately produce 15 million doses of the vaccine.
Originally posted at israeltoday.co.il