J&J announces ‘major commitment’ to Ebola effort
pharmafile | October 22, 2014 | News story | Sales and Marketing | Crucell, Ebola, J&J, JJ, Vaccine, bavarian, johnson, niaid
Johnson & Johnson will invest $200 million to accelerate and significantly expand the production of its Ebola vaccine programme.
The company says it is closely collaborating with the World Health Organization (WHO), the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), as well as other key stakeholders on the development of the treatment.
Its vaccine, which was discovered in a collaborative research programme with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), combines a Janssen preventative vaccine with a treatment from Bavarian Nordic, a biotech company based in Denmark.
This combination vaccine regimen has shown ‘promising results’ according to Janssen in pre-clinical studies, and is now planned to be tested on humans for the first time.
Janssen says it is targeting production of more than one million doses of the vaccine regimen in 2015, 250,000 of which are expected to be released for broad application in clinical trials by May 2015.
The regimen consists of two vaccine components that are based on AdVac technology from Crucell Holland, which is part of Janssen, and the MVA-BN technology from Bavarian Nordic.
Bavarian will receive an upfront payment of $25 million and up to $20 million in milestone payments based on future success of the product. J&J will also invest 251 million Danish crowns ($43 million) in Bavarian Nordic shares.
“We are urgently working to provide our vaccine expertise, production capabilities, our people and resources to address the Ebola crisis,” says Alex Gorsky, chairman and chief executive of Johnson & Johnson.
“Our innovation model enables us to quickly mobilize our extensive resources to collaborate with health authorities and governments and other experts to help contain this disease, save lives, and protect the health and lives of those at risk. We have an important responsibility as a leading global healthcare company to do all we can to address this urgent unmet medical need.”
Johan Van Hoof, global head of infectious diseases and vaccines at Janssen, adds: “In pre-clinical testing conducted in partnership with the National Institutes of Health, the combination vaccine regimen has shown complete protection against Ebola.
“Using our PER.C6 high density cell production technology, we have been able to produce large quantities of the Janssen component of the vaccine regimen in testing batches, and we have already started production toward our goal to have these vaccines available for clinical testing in the next several months.”
In September, Johnson & Johnson and Bavarian Nordic first announced they would fast-track the development and clinical testing of the vaccine programme.
The emergence of Ebola in West Africa has strained the health care systems of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, where nearly 5,000 people have died and 10,000 have been infected with the deadly virus.
There is currently no vaccine against the deadly disease, but several firms are racing to develop products and clinical tests on two are already under way.
One of these is GlaxoSmithKline, although the company admitted last week that its vaccine will come ‘too late’ for the current outbreak, despite being fast-tracked.
But J&J told reporters this morning that it may team up with rival GSK for a combination treatment.
The US firm’s head of research Paul Stoffels said: “I have spoken with [GSK chief executive] Andrew Witty over the past few days several times as colleagues on how we are going to solve this […] it might even be that we have to combine their vaccine with ours.”
A drug from Mapp Pharmaceuticals called ZMapp has also been used on a number of patients, but with varying results. ZMapp has also not yet been formally tested on humans.
Ben Adams
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