Johnson & Johnson Announces a Lead COVID-19 Vaccine Candidate

Johnson & Johnson has identified a lead COVID-19 vaccine candidate and expects to initiate a Phase I human clinical trial by September 2020 at the latest, according to a recent announcement.

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The potential vaccine was discovered from constructs the company has been working on since January through the expansion of its existing partnership between its Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), part of HHS.

Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies announced in mid-February it will expand its partnership with BARDA.

"The world is facing an urgent public health crisis and we are committed to doing our part to make a COVID-19 vaccine available and affordable globally as quickly as possible. As the world's largest healthcare company, we feel a deep responsibility to improve the health of people around the world every day,” Alex Gorsky, chairman and chief executive officer at Johnson & Johnson, said in the announcement.

The most recent announcement noted that Johnson & Johnson’s and BARDA will commit more than $1 billion of investment to co-fund vaccine research, development, and clinical testing.

The potential vaccine selection also came from the scaling of the Company’s manufacturing capacity with the goal of providing a global supply of more than one billion doses of a vaccine, the announcement highlighted. The first batches of the vaccine could be available for severe patients in early 2021.

Johnson & Johnson first began efforts to research potential vaccine candidates in collaboration with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, part of Harvard Medical School, when the COVID-19 sequence became available. Since then, various vaccine candidates were tested using Janssen AdVac technology. 

“We will use our validated vaccine platform and allocating resources, including personnel and infrastructure globally, as needed, to focus on these efforts,” the announcement stated.

Johnson & Johnson will also expand its global manufacturing capacity, including through the establishment of new US vaccine manufacturing capabilities and boosting capacity in other countries, to further its commitment to tackling COVID-19.

"We greatly value the U.S. government's confidence and support for our R&D efforts. Johnson & Johnson's global team of experts has ramped up our research and development processes to unprecedented levels, and our teams are working tirelessly alongside BARDA, scientific partners, and global health authorities,” said Paul Stoffels, MD, vice chairman of the executive committee and chief scientific officer at Johnson & Johnson.

“We are very pleased to have identified a lead vaccine candidate from the constructs we have been working on since January. We are moving on an accelerated timeline toward Phase 1 human clinical trials at the latest by September 2020 and, supported by the global production capability that we are scaling up in parallel to this testing, we expect a vaccine could be ready for emergency use in early 2021."