• Question: can animals help find a vaccine for COVID 19

    Asked by anon-253472 to Helena on 12 May 2020.
    • Photo: Helena Fisk

      Helena Fisk answered on 12 May 2020: last edited 13 May 2020 9:27 am

      Hi Noah, thanks for your question!

      Typically, a step in the development of vaccines is to trial them in animals. This is not only to test they work, but also to test their safety (do they have any nasty side effects or cause harm) before they are tested in humans.

      The COVID-19 vaccine developed in Oxford UK has been testing in pigs and monkeys and a COVID-19 vaccine developed in Beijing has also been tested in monkeys.

      Vaccine development can take anywhere between 5-20 years but given the urgency to find a vaccine, trials in humans are happening much earlier than usual.

      There are many studies currently being investigated in non-animal models too such as models of human respiratory tissue, growing the viral cells to try and understand how it spreads and causes sickness, and using computer modelling to look at properties of the virus and current medicines/drugs to see how they might interact and the effectiveness against the virus. This could identify potentially effective drugs which could then be tested.

      Hope that helps! 🙂

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