A study to see how the COVID-19 vaccination affects how the body fights infection (OCTAVE)

In 2021 the research team published early (interim) results for the OCTAVE trial. They don’t have full results for the trial yet. 

They plan to publish more results at a later date. We hope to update this page once more results are available.

This is a summary of the results so far.

Results
The team have looked at the first 600 people in the trial to see how well their immune system responded to the COVID-19 vaccine. This included people with a number of different auto immune diseases and some people with cancer. The numbers who had cancer were: 

• 47 who had breast cancer or lung cancer
• 18 people who had acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) or myeloma

And people who had a stem cell transplant.

4 weeks after the 2nd vaccine injection the team found that the immune system responded in:

• all the people (100%) who had breast cancer or lung cancer
• just under 89 out of every 100 people (88.9%) who had AML or myeloma 
• just over 88 out of every 100 people (88.1%) who had a stem cell transplant

OCTAVE early results - Percentage of people whose immune system had a response graph

The team also compared these people with the immune response of healthy volunteers. They found that for a significant number their immune response was lower than the healthy volunteers. 

Conclusion
These are early results. They can help decide whether a booster vaccine injection might be worthwhile for this group of people. 

What isn’t known is how well the vaccine can protect this group of people from getting COVID-19. 

The team say there is a need to further study those who haven’t had an immune response. 

This trial is still open and recruiting people. The team say that with more people and further analysis this will provide more answers. 

Where this information comes from
We have based this summary on information from the research team. The information they sent us has been reviewed by independent specialists (peer reviewed ) and published in a medical journal. The figures we quote above were provided by the trial team who did the research. We have not analysed the data ourselves.