J&J halts COVID-19 vaccine study following unidentified participant illness

pharmafile | October 13, 2020 | News story | Manufacturing and Production, Research and Development |  COVID-19, J&J, JJ, Vaccine, pharma 

Johnson & Johnson has announced its decision to slam the brakes on the development programme for its COVID-19 vaccine following the illness of one of the participants

The pharma giant said that it was “committed to providing transparent updates” on the progress of the developing vaccine in line with regulatory requirements and the company’s own “high ethical and scientific principles”.

The illness has not yet been identified and J&J said it would share more info once the event had been investigated by an independent Data Safety Monitoring Board. The company aims to test the therapy in up to 60,000 patients at trial sites around the world. J&J’s shares fell 2.4% on announcement of the decision.

J&J was keen to stress that the occurrence was not out of the ordinary and is not expected to significantly impact further development, stating: “Adverse events, even those that are serious, are an expected part of any clinical study, especially large studies.”

Advertisement

The decision makes J&J the second company to halt a high-profile study in the COVID-19 space, after AstraZeneca chose to pause research of its candidate developed in partnership with the University of Oxford after a participant was struck with an unexplained illness.

Matt Fellows

Related Content

Amphista doses first patient in AML trial of protein degrader

Amphista Therapeutics has dosed the first patient in a phase 1 trial of AMX-883, an …

Tridem begins phase Ib trial of Parkinson’s disease vaccine

Tridem Bioscience has enrolled the first patients in a phase Ib clinical trial of TRB-001, …

Pharma sees climate disruption as growing supply-chain risk

Nine in ten pharmaceutical companies across the UK and G7 countries expect climate-related disruption to …

The Gateway to Local Adoption Series

Latest content