COVID-19 Research

                   CIR COVID TEAM

When the world stopped due to the COVID-19 pandemic, important work being conducted by CIR's individual study teams was put on hold.  As a vaccine research center, our focus became doing our part to find a safe and effective COVID vaccine, and when candidates became available, we made the most of our clinical trial expertise by becoming a study site for multiple large-scale COVID-19 phase 3 vaccine trials. Ultimately, the CIR  enrolled hundreds of volunteers into these studies in an extraordinarily small amount of time. To pull this off, the MVAC and FIRE teams reconfigured into the COVID Team, whose focus was to enroll volunteers into these phase 3 clinical trials.

CIR became a study site for the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 mRNA vaccine clinical trial, enrolling adults and children into multiple studies for this sponsor.  Data generated from these efforts helped justify the emergency use authorization (EUA) granted by the FDA for the Pfizer mRNA vaccine.  We also became a study site for the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine trial, enrolling over 300 volunteers into that study. Our work early on in the pandemic helped to identify a safe and effective vaccine for the prevention of COVID-19.   

The MVAC and FIRE teams have returned to the research that was put on hold when the pandemic started, but follow up for some of the COVID trials continue as well as the evaluation of new COVID vaccine candidates.  The MVAC team is preparing for a study to test an intranasal COVID-19 vaccine.