April 30, 2020 - 15:53 AMT
Oxford University's new vaccine trial results expected in June

The first results from human trials of a coronavirus vaccine being developed by Oxford University should be available by mid-June, CNN cited Oxford professor John Bell as saying on Thursday, April 30.

“This is still a development program. We need still to demonstrate that this vaccine works in human populations,” he told BBC Radio. “But the team … have vaccinated several hundred people now and we hope to get some signal about whether it’s working by the middle of June.”

The Oxford University research team is partnering with UK-based global biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca to develop and manufacture this vaccine on a large scale.

“Once we get an approval by the regulators, we don’t want to have to go back to the beginning and work out how we manufacture it at scale. And we also want to make sure that the rest of the world will be ready to make this vaccine at scale,” Professor Bell said.

There are now more than 3.2 million coronavirus cases and almost 228,000 worldwide.