Roopesh Chavda is an engineer with a background in mathematics, and the kind of person who responds to a crisis by researching what can be done to overcome it. In August 2020, as COVID-19 reshaped daily life and scientists raced to catch up, he was doing his own reading about how vaccines work and what it would take to bring one forward. “I just wanted to have the most information about how we can get out of this,” he recalls. Through his reading, he realized that he might be in a position to help. He signed up with 1Day Sooner that same month, hoping to enroll in a Controlled Human Infection Model (CHIM) study as a healthy volunteer.
Originally from the United Kingdom and now based in France, Roopesh went on to take part in two COVID-19 CHIM trials run by Imperial College London. Each involved a 16-day inpatient quarantine. Together, they shaped how he thinks about research participation and the role individuals can play in advancing public health.
He approached quarantine methodically. Before going in for the quarantine period, he arranged to work remotely, mapped out his reading, and thought through how he would hold onto his daily routines. “Just having that plan before going in meant that when I was there, doing those things, it felt like it was fine,” he recalls. His trust in the research team also helped to make his trial participation experience a positive one. He “always felt quite safe” and “never felt worried or uncomfortable,” crediting “the professionalism of all of the research staff and the hospital, working very well together.” Roopesh took part out of a mix of altruism and scientific curiosity, but he also believes it was important that he was compensated for the risk he was taking on.
Having been through both trials and seen the results, his commitment only grew. He describes his motivation as having “massively increased actually having been through the process of participating in challenge studies.” He had seen, concretely, how this kind of research could bring new treatments, vaccines, and therapies forward faster, and how much scrutiny each step of the process was subject to. That conviction turned him into an advocate, not just for challenge trials but for how they are designed and who they serve.
Research Participation: Two COVID-19 Controlled Human Infection Model (CHIM) studies
Passionate About: Contributing to trial design and improving patient and healthy participant experience
Outside the Council: Raised £2,000 for a surplus food redistribution charity in Oxford while driving a Tuk Tuk for two weeks in India
His Friends Describe Him as: Adventurous, respectful, harmonious
Roopesh raised £2,000 for a surplus food redistribution charity in Oxford while driving a Tuk Tuk for two weeks in India
For example, during his first trial he provided feedback to the research team which led to improvements in future trials. The study’s screening tool used an algorithm that factored in his Indian and Asian ethnic background, flagging him as higher risk for chronic conditions like heart disease or diabetes. Roopesh found the risk differential negligible for someone of his age and lifestyle, and he raised the issue directly with the research team. By the second trial he joined, which was run by the same institution, the algorithm had been removed. Roopesh didn’t ask why they’d made the change, but wondered whether “they realized it wasn’t a good way of putting a metric on people’s health.”
That experience also shaped how he talks to people who are curious about volunteering but unsure whether they qualify. The term “healthy volunteers,” he thinks, can put people off before they even look at the criteria. “I think you can still be healthy by living a reasonably active life and having a diet that you enjoy but not overindulging and overconsuming bad things,” he says. His message to anyone interested in becoming a trial participant is to not be deterred by the word “healthy.” Instead, sign up for screening and let the researchers decide whether you’re healthy enough to take part in the study.
The key question for me is about how we could use the trial data to have the most positive impact on the least benefited in society.
Now Roopesh channels his experience into 1Day Sooner’s Participant Council. He joined because he sees the limits of individual advocacy and because he values being part of an international community of volunteers who can learn from one another. He’s optimistic about what can be achieved. “There’s all sorts of things…[we can do]… with the right minds, the right people, the right money in the right places,” he explains.
His focus on the Council is twofold: improving the participant experience in future trials, and asking harder questions about who benefits from the data those trials generate. He is particularly interested in how research results can reach countries where disease burden is highest and health systems are weakest — places where a crisis like COVID would have played out very differently. “The key question for me,” he says, “is about how we could use the trial data to have the most positive impact on the least benefited in society.”
High-impact studies are happening all over the world. If you’ve ever thought about taking part in research as a healthy volunteer — or wondered whether your experience as a participant could be put to broader use — 1Day Sooner wants to hear from you. You can sign up at https://www.1daysooner.org/volunteer/ or reach out at volunteer@1daysooner.org.