London: Scientists from the University of Oxford have opened up their COVID-19 vaccines for clinical trial recruitments as part of a rapid vaccine response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The trial, a collaboration between the university's Jenner Institute and Oxford Vaccine Group clinical teams, will recruit up to 510 volunteers, who will receive either the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine or a control injection for comparison.

The researchers, working in an unprecedented vaccine development effort to prevent COVID-19, said they have started screening healthy volunteers (aged 18-55) from Friday for their upcoming trial in the Thames Valley Region of England.

The Oxford team had exceptional experience of a rapid vaccine response, such as to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014. This is an even greater challenge, said Professor Adrian Hill, Director of the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford.

Vaccines are being designed from scratch and progressed at an unprecedented rate. The upcoming trial will be critical for assessing the feasibility of vaccination against COVID-19 and could lead to early deployment, he said.

The vaccine based on an adenovirus vaccine vector and the SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 spike protein is already in production but won't be ready for some weeks.

The team will, meanwhile, enrol healthy volunteers aged between 18-55, who, if they pass screening, will be the first humans to test the new vaccine, called ChAdOx1 nCoV-19. The trial will provide valuable information on the safety aspects of the vaccine, as well as its ability to generate an immune response against the virus.

Interested individuals can volunteer to participate on the COVID-19 vaccine website.

Detailed preclinical work is being done and the vaccine is being manufactured to clinical grade standard at the Clinical Biomanufacturing Facility at Oxford University.

The trial has been approved by UK regulators and ethical reviewers. Researchers are working as quickly as possible to get the vaccine ready to be used in the trial, which includes further preclinical investigations and production of a larger number of doses of the vaccine.

Professor Andrew Pollard, Chief Investigator on the study, said: Starting the clinical trials is the first step in the efforts to find out whether the new vaccine being developed at Oxford University works and could safely play a central role in controlling the pandemic coronavirus that is sweeping the globe.

Scientists around the world are working hard to develop a vaccine to prevent COVID-19, but there is a lot to be done.

The Oxford team led by Professor Sarah Gilbert, Professor Andrew Pollard, Professor Teresa Lambe, Dr Sandy Douglas and Professor Adrian Hill started work designing a vaccine on January 10.

Professor Gilbert and team have previously developed a vaccine for another human coronavirus disease, which is Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and this has shown promise in early clinical trials.