HEALTHY young Brits who have previously had Covid could earn £5,000 for being infected with the virus.
A study is hoping to start later this month once it's given ethical approval.
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Participants will be deliberately exposed to the virus for a second time to see how the immune system reacts in what’s called a “challenge study”.
Researchers at the University of Oxford aim to determine what dose of virus is needed to re-infect after natural infection, how the immune system responds, and what this may mean for developing protective immunity against the disease.
It will help with research for vaccines, for example.
The study, which is funded by the Wellcome Trust, will recruit people aged 18-30 who have previously been naturally infected with Covid.
They may have experienced only mild disease or no symptoms at all and made a full recovery.
In the first phase of the study, involving 64 healthy volunteers, researchers aim to establish the lowest dose of virus which can take hold and start replicating.
Then this dose will be used to infect participants in the second phase of the study, which is expected to start in the summer.
Brave volunteers will be re-exposed to the virus in a safe and controlled environment while a team of researchers monitor their health.
They will have to be quarantined for 17 days at a hospital until they are no longer at risk of infecting others.
Those who develop symptoms will be given a dose of super antibodies to make sure they recover.
The treatment, which contains laboratory-made antibodies that have shown to reduce the risk of disease progression in clinical trials, has been developed by Regeneron.
The full length of the study will be 12 months, which will include eight follow-up appointments after discharge.
Helen McShane, professor of vaccinology at the department of paediatrics, University of Oxford and chief investigator on the study, said: “Challenge studies tell us things that other studies cannot because, unlike natural infection, they are tightly controlled.
“When we re-infect these participants, we will know exactly how their immune system has reacted to the first Covid infection, exactly when the second infection occurs, and exactly how much virus they got.
“As well as enhancing our basic understanding, this may help us to design tests that can accurately predict whether people are protected.
“The information from this work will allow us to design better vaccines and treatments, and also to understand if people are protected after having Covid, and for how long.”
Prof McShane virus used in the study will be the original strain from Wuhan, China, “because that is the strain that we have most clinical, immunological (and) virological data on” but added discussions are under way to include one of the new coronavirus variants.
Challenge studies come with ethical concerns because the patients are at risk of getting severely ill.
There are also questions around whether participants could get long Covid.
But Prof McShane suggested she was confident that participants would not get persistent symptoms.
She told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "These people have already had one infection with Covid and fully recovered from it.
"That infection from the first time round would have been very mild or possibly even asymptomatic.
"They will have no signs of long Covid after their first infection, and they will have fully completely recovered.
"To date, there have been no documented cases of long Covid after second infection."
Challenge studies have played a key role in furthering the development of treatments for diseases such as malaria, TB, typhoid, cholera and flu.
Recent research has suggested prior infection may not fully protect young people against reinfection.
An observational study, published in the Lancet, involved US Marine Corps members mostly aged 18-20.
It showed that between May and November 2020, around 10 per cent of participants who had previously caught coronavirus became re-infected.
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