Last autumn the Oxford Vaccine Group was the lead site on a novel influenza H1N1 (‘Swine Flu’) vaccine study that enrolled over 900 children in 5 weeks.
This rapid recruitment enabled us to provide data to the Department of Health in time to directly inform the national ‘Swine Flu’ immunisation policy, and was only possible due to the support of the National Institute for Health’s Research Policy Research Programme, the Oxford Biomedical Research Centre, The University of Oxford Department of Paediatrics and the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS trust. We are pleased to be able to announce that the results from this study have recently been published in the ‘British Medical Journal’.
The trial looked at two commercially available novel H1N1 vaccines to compare their safety and how well they induced an immune response against the Swine Flu virus. The results showed that both vaccines generated good immune responses, with significantly higher antibody levels seen after immunisation with the vaccine most commonly used in the UK.
In order to thank these institutions and the many children, parents and staff members who made this study possible we held an event on Wednesday 14th July at the Richard Doll Building on the Churchill Hospital site.