Johnson & Johnson began human trials of its experimental COVID-19 vaccine on Thursday, after the shooting has already proven successful in protecting monkeys, the drug maker announced.
The company’s honchos pointed to a new study that found that five out of six primates who received the single dose were protected from infection when exposed to the coronavirus, as measured by its presence in nasal swabs.
“This gives us confidence that we can test a single injection vaccine in this epidemic and know if it has a protective effect on humans,” Dr. Paul Stoffels, chief scientific officer at J&J, told Reuters.
The study, published Thursday in the journal Nature, also found that six of six of the monkeys were protected from COVID-19-related lung diseases.
J&J said it will now test its candidate vaccine on more than 1,000 healthy adults ages 18 to 55, along with people over the age of 65 in early-stage human trials in the United States and Belgium.
In other cases, the researchers found that a second injection significantly increases protection against the disease, but a single-injection vaccine is crucial during a pandemic because it reduces problems like getting people back for a second dose, Stoffels said.
The company plans to address the question of whether the vaccine should be one or two doses during phase one of the human trial, he said.
The clinical trial is one of more than 30 human trials for coronavirus vaccines being conducted worldwide, according to the New York Times, which noted that some experts were optimistic about the results of the new study. .
“This week has been a good one, we now have two vaccines that work in monkeys,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University who was not involved in the research. “It’s nice to be optimistic for a change.”
The United States government is investing $ 456 million in J&J vaccine development as part of an effort to accelerate production of a vaccine for COVID-19, which has killed more than 667,000 people worldwide, including more than 150,000 Americans, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
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