Would you volunteer to get yourself infected with flu in Canary Wharf?
For £3,000 you can opt to spend a week helping to create the next generations of vaccines at the world’s largest human challenge trial and quarantine facility – a minute’s walk from Canary Wharf, says Phoebe Arslanagić-Little
In October I wrote in Morning Wire about human challenge trials – a medical research study that sees participants voluntarily infected with a disease – after meeting a man who had recently participated in a salmonella challenge trial and has volunteered to be infected with the plague in 2025.
My article was spotted by Hvivo, a medical research company, who invited me on a tour of their human challenge trial labs and quarantine facility. Astonishingly, this is housed a minute’s walk away from Canary Wharf tube station, in a skyscraper that used to be home to companies like Allen and Overy. Canary Wharf commuters are likely as unaware as I was that 90 per cent of the world’s commercial human challenge trials take place in this very building and that it is the largest facility of its kind in the entire world.
Hvivo specialises in respiratory illnesses, like the flu and Covid-19, and ran a human challenge trial testing the effectiveness of Pfizer’s Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) vaccine. Though you may not have heard of RSV, you have most probably had it. RSV gives sufferers symptoms very similar to those of a bad cold, like a headache and a runny nose. For healthy adults it poses no problems, but RSV is the leading cause of hospitalisation for babies, responsible for putting about 20,000 children aged under 1 in hospital a year.
As of September this very year, the RSV vaccine that Hvivo tested was made available to pregnant women on the NHS. Happily, I accidentally timed my pregnancy (I’m due to give birth at the end of December) perfectly to receive this new vaccine. That means my baby will have protection from RSV for the first few months of her life. I feel very grateful to those who helped get the vaccine to me by agreeing to have the virus squirted up their nose in Canary Wharf, then spending ten days or more in quarantine.
An investment in public health
As pointed out by Alastair Fraser-Urquhart in a paper for think tank UK Day One, investment in human challenge trials is an investment in public health and something the government should be thinking about, particularly for viruses where there is no obvious profit motive. Improving our national challenge trial infrastructure would also make us better prepared for the next pandemic, enabling us to develop a vaccine faster.
If you feel your sense of public service stirring, you may be interested to hear that each of Hvivo’s quarantine rooms has a Playstation and a large TV, and some have spectacular views over London. Challenge trial participants also have access to an app through which they can order a huge variety of meals, prepared by an in-house chef and brought to them not by a Deliveroo driver but by a nurse wearing PPE. The Hvivo team were also extremely proud of the hospital-grade furniture in each quarantine room, specially ordered from Italy for their aesthetic merits which, I have to say, were too subtle for me.
But the volunteers who make human challenge trials possible are still spending well over a week in a small-ish room, which is a taxing thing (whether or not you have access to unlimited snacks and a desk from Italy). They are asked to do no exercise whatsoever and to consume no caffeine.
Volunteers are compensated for participating in these studies, usually around £3,000 to £5,000, dependent on the length of their quarantine. But couldn’t we make more of a fuss of them and their public-spirited contribution? I want to see people walking around wearing t-shirts that say, “I got the flu so you don’t have to” or with a “Human challenge trial volunteer” badge pinned to their jacket. If I noticed someone with this badge in the queue at a café, I could get them a coffee.
For now, next time you find yourself in Canary Wharf and are enjoying that which trial participants are temporarily depriving themselves of – a latte, a jog, fresh air – spare them a grateful thought.
Phoebe Arslanagić-Little is a columnist at Morning Wire and head of the New Deal for Parents at Onward