COLLEGE STATION, Texas — The path to creating the COVID-19 vaccine has not yet been a successful one. But, a new clinical trial wants to repurpose an already existing vaccine for bladder cancer and tuberculosis to currently slow down mortality rates from coronavirus.
Bryan College Station will be the first site in the country to test the bladder cancer vaccine, BCG, on healthcare workers. This new six-month trial wants to repurpose the already FDA approved vaccine to fight COVID-19 right now.
“It’s really the only vaccine in the world that could be put out immediately. There are actually over 100 different types of vaccines people are currently working on but most of those haven’t even been tested in animals yet, and who wants to test them in humans first? That’s pretty dangerous," said Dr. Jeffrey Cirillo, the Regent’s Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis and Immunology at the Texas A&M Health Science Center.
The goal of the trial is to not only reduce the number of coronavirus cases but also to lessen the severity of the virus.
“The group we’re vaccinating first is healthcare workers, and clearly having a positive effect on our healthcare workers' ability to function normally, feel healthy, as well as to not have to take things off of work. Especially now, when there are so many people going to ICU units," said Cirillo.
Enrollment for the trial started this week. In order for the trial to take place, researchers are recruiting one hundred healthcare workers per trial site.
BCG has shown to have as much as 70-80 percent reduction in mortality for various viral infections and researchers are hoping this will be the case for COVID-19 as well.
“It’s not a panacea and people need to understand that. We don’t think it’s going to completely prevent all infections from occurring, and the hope is that a specific vaccine in development in the next two to three years will be able to completely prevent the disease. But what we need is something in that window where we don’t have a vaccine so this allows us to buy time till something can be developed," said Cirillo
The trial will be monitoring symptoms of the participants daily and evaluate their immune response to the vaccine on a monthly basis.
Dr. Cirillo hopes to have some answers regarding this trial over the next two months. If you are a healthcare worker and want to participate in this trial, contact Gabriel Neal, MD at gneal@tamu.edu.