Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of £1,098,103 (approximately $1,353,450 at the time of conversion) over five years to Professor Ellie Barnes and Professor Peter Simmonds at the University of Oxford (UK), Professor Graham Cooke at Imperial College (UK), and Professor Philip Meuleman at Ghent University (Belgium) to support a joint project developing and testing a CHIM (controlled human infection model), which could be used to evaluate vaccines for hepatitis C (HCV). CHIM studies involve exposing volunteers to a controlled dose of a pathogen. They require fewer participants and are easier to carry out than real-world efficacy trials, which require following a large number of people until enough of them naturally contract the virus to enable a comparison between the treatment and control groups. And because there are several direct-acting antiviral medications for HCV, it is possible to reliably cure infected volunteers afterwards, making CHIM studies relatively safe. (For more on the ethics of these studies, see this issue of the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.)
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