KUALA LUMPUR, April 23 — The Malaysian-born UK-based trainee surgeon, Dr Nur Amalina Che Bakri has joined a team of scientist at the Imperial College in London to find a vaccine in the battle against Covid-19, which affected people worldwide.
Dr Amalina on her personal Twitter account said she was involved in recruiting healthy volunteers based in the United Kingdom to facilitate the vaccine trials that is being conducted at the Imperial College’s National Institute of Health Research (NIHR).
“The first of the UK vaccine trials has started at the NIHR Imperial Clinical Research Facility @imperialcollege led by Dr Katrina Pollock. I’m involved in recruiting healthy volunteers and vaccinating them in the next few weeks,” Dr Amalina tweeted yesterday.
Dr Pollock is a Senior Clinical Research Fellow in Vaccinology and Honourary Consultant in Genitourinary and HIV Medicine at Imperial College London and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.
Dr Amalina said: “This is one of the two candidate vaccines that we will test at Imperial College. Great effort from Imperial team and very excited to see the outcome!”
Dr Amalina added that it is “a collaboration study with Oxford. Imperial and Oxford are both testing the same vaccine. Multi-centre randomised controlled trial.”
She also shared @ImperialMed’s tweet requesting for voluntary participants.
Meanwhile, UK health secretary Matt Hancock tweeted: “The first human trials for vaccines begin in the UK today. We’re giving the 2 leading UK vaccine teams at Oxford and Imperial all the support they need to make it happen”.
According to an article by Imperial College, the UK government will provide £22.5 million (RM121.5 million) to fast-track Imperial’s development of a coronavirus vaccine. — Bernama
