The U.K. government has backed a University of Oxford effort to develop a vaccine against COVID-19. Officials handed out the cash to help Sarah Gilbert’s team deliver on its plans to get a vaccine against the novel coronavirus into clinical testing next month. Gilbert and her collaborators at the university’s Jenner Institute were among the first researchers to start work on a COVID-19 vaccine, leveraging their work on the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus to start preparing for production of clinical trial materials early last month. Source: Fierce Biotech 24/3/2020