The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has announced that the UK will be the first country in the world to undergo a coronavirus (COVID–19) human challenge study. After receiving approval form the UK’s clinical trial ethics body, the study is set to begin within a month. The study is to involve up to 90 attentively selected, healthy adults aged between 18 to 30 years of age who will be exposed to coronavirus ‘in a safe and controlled environment to increase the understanding of how the virus affects people’. The government will invest £33.6m in support of the study, which also aims to provide doctors with a better understanding of how the immune system responds to coronavirus and ‘help support the pandemic response by aiding vaccine and treatment development’.