Hoag Hospital Phase 1 COVID Vaccine Trial Underway
NEWPORT BEACH, CA — A groundbreaking clinical trial is underway Wednesday at Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach. A 25-year-old Irvine woman received the first phase trial of this potential coronavirus vaccine, the hospital shared.
Since the coronavirus reached Orange County in March, Hoag Hospital has remained on the frontlines, helping those infected with coronavirus. The hospital cared for the first Orange County COVID-19 patient back in January, says Dr. Philip Robinson, medical director of infection prevention at Hoag and principal investigator of the vaccine trial. Now, under a collaboration between NantKwest, Inc. and ImmunityBio, Hoag will serve as the trial site with a goal of examining the safety, side effects, and immune system response of the two-dose prospective vaccine.
Chen Cao was the first to be vaccinated in the program. She joins 34 other healthy adults, aged 18- to 55-years-old, a Hoag Hospital spokesperson tells Patch.
Cao learned of the chance to participate and volunteered. "I qualified for all the criteria Hoag is looking for, so why not?" she wrote Patch in an email.
Over the next 21 days, she will write a daily diary, tracking her health, any symptoms she incurs, and writing how she feels. During the trial process, she will meet weekly with a doctor at Hoag.
Thus far, she's had one dose of the vaccine engineered to activate antibodies against the coronavirus.
Now, all involved in the program watch and wait.
Cao will return to life as usual, not isolated, but living in the new normal amid the coronavirus pandemic.
If all goes well, in 21 days, she will receive a booster shot, the second phase of the trial vaccine.
According to Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, Chairman and CEO of ImmunityBio and NantKwest, this vaccine candidate, hdA5-COVID-19, is one of the only vaccine candidates in development that targets two proteins: both the nucleocapsid protein on the interior of the virus particle and the spike protein on the virus' surface.
"We believe this dual targeting is a key advantage that may lead to the stimulation of both T-cell-mediated and antibody-mediated immunity to SARS-CoV-2," Soon-Schiong says, "which is an important differentiator from other vaccine candidates that only target the spike protein."
Whenever a vaccine is ultimately approved by the FDA and disseminated for public consumption, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state experts will independently review the vaccine, with "world-class experts that just happen to live here the state of California," Newsom said, Tuesday.
While officials say Pfizer and Moderna are leading the vaccine race, no one has yet crossed the finish line with an approved vaccine.
Newsom said the state was given more than $28 million in federal aid last week for the vaccine rollout in exchange for submitting its 84-page vaccine plan to the Centers For Disease Control.
The state reported a 4 percent decrease in hospitalizations in the last 14-days and recorded 2,966 cases over a 7-day average.
There has been much waiting during the pandemic. She graduated without her family in attendance, because of COVID. She hasn't seen them in two years, since she moved to California from Shanghai.
"All plans had to be canceled," she writes. Though her family doesn't know that she volunteered for the trial, she feels they would support her decision, even if they would "shout" at her because she didn't discuss it with them first, she writes.
"They taught me that being a good person is the #1 thing in life. I'm a little nervous, as this is my first medical trial experience," she admits.
Still, Cao says she can't imagine how much worse people feel who are suffering for lost loved ones due to the virus, adding, "I'm just glad I can help a little bit."
For now, Cao returns to her life, working, watching movies at home, and exercising as per usual, knowing that she is doing her part to volunteer, she says. The sadness of missing her family is replaced with the knowledge she's taking part in something that could be monumental.
"It feels good," she says, "knowing that this will ultimately help a great many people."
This article originally appeared on the Newport Beach-Corona Del Mar Patch
