Israelis will be recruited to take part in two additional coronavirus vaccine trials beyond the Israel Institute of Biological Research trial that started on Sunday, according to Eytan Ben-Ami, head of early phase clinical trials at Sheba Medical Center.
According to the hospital, Israelis will be selected to take part in vaccine trials being run by undisclosed companies in Australia and Europe. The trials should begin within months if not before.
“Many thousands of people will be participating in the trials,” Ben-Ami told The Jerusalem Post. “We hope that in the very near future we will have various vaccine options for our population.”
If the vaccines are proven safe and effective, the people who were inoculated with them will be immune to the virus.
The European trial, like the IIBR trial that kicked off Sunday morning with two volunteers at Hadassah-University Medical Center, in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem, and Sheba, is a Phase I/II trial. The Australian trial is in Phase III.
Ben-Ami said that he expects the volunteers that will be recruited for these trials to be broader and more diverse than those recruited for the Phase I IIBR trial, which only includes healthy adults between the ages of 18-55.
Sheba will not be the only medical center participating in the trials, he said, but will join other hospitals around the world.
He said he does not foresee the Australian and European trials interfering with Israel’s own vaccine trial.
It is not uncommon for companies to look outside their own country for volunteers for such trials. In an interview with the Post on Sunday, IIBR director Prof. Shmuel Shapira said that Israel would be recruiting volunteers from other countries to assist in his vaccine’s Phase III trial, if and when the time comes. He said he was in negotiations but no deals had yet been signed.
“Sheba is really a center of excellence and we are a center for many pharmaceutical [trials], and this is why I believe we were chosen to participate in these trials as well,” he said, noting that more than 3,000 clinical trials are currently taking place at the medical center. “Our leadership over the years has taken us to this place where we are offered to participate in very important trials like these vaccines for COVID-19.”
However, he added that to his knowledge, Sheba has never taken part in a vaccine trial before the coronavirus.