Covid-19: France calls on 25,000 volunteers to test vaccines

France is calling on 25,000 adult volunteers, young and old, to test potential vaccines against Covid-19 and on Thursday opened the "Covireivac" information and registration platform for them.

Volunteers, who must be 18 years of age or over, are invited to complete a health questionnaire on the website www.covireivac.fr, which will then allow researchers to select them according to the needs of the planned trials.

Led by the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm), the Covireivac platform relies on 24 clinical investigation centers (CIC) in university hospital centers (CHU), in conjunction with the College national generalist teachers.

Registrants soon solicited

"In the weeks and months to come, we will solicit registrants," said Dr Odile Launay, infectious disease specialist at Cochin hospital in Paris (AP-HP) and Covireivac coordinator during an online conference.

She did not detail which vaccines will be tested.

The platform - a "one-stop-shop for France" - is designed to carry out up to five phase 2 trials (choice of dose and schedule of injections on 50 to 500 people), and three phase 3 trials, which require several thousand people to assess whether the vaccine is safe and protects against Covid-19, she said.

A call of such magnitude, with the creation of a dedicated platform, is unprecedented in France.

People 65 years of age or over who will participate

Poorly represented or absent from vaccine trials, people 65 years of age or over, the main victims of the disease, and those with risk factors (diabetes, obesity, pulmonary diseases, arterial hypertension, renal failure) are called upon to participate.

This includes conducting a phase 2 clinical trial comparing the response to a vaccine candidate of elderly people, who may have weakened immune systems, with those of a group of younger people.

A way to assess whether the vaccine is likely to protect the most vulnerable.

For the moment, there is only one phase 1 trial (first administration on a limited number of healthy individuals, from 10 to 100) in progress in France, that of the Institut Pasteur.

Phase 3 trials are underway abroad, but none in France where the circulation of the virus was not sufficient until then.

To assess effectiveness, "the regions chosen will be those where the virus circulates the most, such as the Ile-de-France, the Lyon region and the East," says Dr Launay.

In phase 3 trials, funded by industry, participants will receive one or two doses of either the vaccine candidate or the placebo.