Northwestern Medicine has launched a COVID Prevention Trials Registry for people who are interested in participating in COVID-19 clinical trials to prevent infection from the virus.

“We want to recruit participants in the Chicago area who are at risk for exposure to COVID-19 and who are potentially interested in participating in different studies for prevention of the infection,” said Dr. Karen Krueger, the principal investigator of the registry. She is a Northwestern Medicine physician and instructor in infectious diseases at Feinberg School of Medicine.

The research is being sponsored by Feinberg.

Participants in the registry will be contacted when an appropriate study based on their health profile is being conducted. The goal is to recruit 5,000 individuals for the COVID Prevention Trials Registry.

The at-risk individuals being sought are 18 years and older and working in a job that puts them at higher risk of exposure to the virus. That includes health care workers, people who work in a grocery store or retail outlet, public transportation employees, factory or plant workers, and individuals who live or work in congregated living facilities like nursing homes. The registry also needs members of the community who are disproportionately affected by COVID-19 such as older persons, racial/ethnic groups like African Americans, Latinx and Native Americans and people with certain underlying health conditions.

“We are casting a really wide net so we can make sure we have enough people identified and ready to go for upcoming studies,” Krueger said. “This is vital to individuals’ and community health during the coronavirus pandemic.”

The first study — expected to launch in August — will be a Phase 3 trial investigating the new AstraZeneca LLC vaccine drug candidate. Results of the Phase 1/2 trial of the drug were published in The Lancet journal last week. The showed the drug was safe and boosted antibody responses. The planned trial sites are the downtown Chicago campus, Lake Forest Hospital and Central DuPage Hospital.