J&J begins human vaccine trials
Uses an inactivated virus to train the body to recognise and respond to Sars-cov-2
NEW DELHI: Johnson & Johnson (J&J) on Thursday kicked off US human safety trials for its Covid-19 vaccine after releasing details of a study in monkeys that showed its best-performing vaccine candidate offering strong protection in a single dose.
When exposed to the virus, six of six animals who got the vaccine candidate were completely protected from lung disease and five of six were protected from infection, as measured by the presence of virus in nasal swabs, according to the study published in the journal Nature.
“This gives us confidence that we can test a single-shot vaccine in this epidemic and learn whether it has a protective effect in humans,” Dr Paul Stoffels, J&J’S chief scientific officer, told Reuters in a telephone interview.
The drugmaker said it had started early-stage human trials in the United States and Belgium and would test its vaccine candidate in more than 1,000 healthy adults aged 18 to 55 years, as well as adults aged 65 years and older.
The US government is backing J&J’S vaccine effort with $456 million in funding as part of a spending spree aimed at speeding production of a vaccine to end the pandemic, which has infected millions and killed more than 660,000 people.
Stoffels said prior tests of this type of vaccine in other diseases found that a second shot significantly increases protection. But in a pandemic, a single-shot vaccine has a significant advantage.