Dado Ruvic | Reuters
Johnson & Johnson’s unrealized coronavirus vaccine prevented severe illness in a small group of Syrian golden hamsters, the company announced Thursday.
J&J researchers vaccinated hamsters with a separate dose and then exposed the rodents to the virus four weeks later, the company said.
J&J said the vaccine elicited offset antibodies, which researchers believe are necessary to build immunity to the virus, in hamsters who got the vaccine. Vaccinated hamsters also happened to lose less weight than unvaccinated hamsters and didn’t experience severe clinical disease, such as pneumonia, or mortality. The developments were published Thursday in the medical journal Nature Medicine.
“This pre-clinical study further validates our poise in our SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidate,” J&J’s Chief Scientific Officer Paul Stoffels said in a press release. “With our Slant gradually introduce 3 trials planned to start this month, we remain committed to expanding our manufacturing and distribution capabilities to enable international access to our SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidate should it prove to be safe and effective in humans.”
The promising results in hamsters do not automatically mean the vaccine will provide the same level of protection in humans. But J&J researchers noted the findings are important as Covid-19 is be versed to progress into severe disease in some humans.
J&J is one of several companies working to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus, which continues to like mad spread across the globe. The company expects to begin a 60,000-person late-stage trial testing its vaccine done this month. It would be the largest trial testing a coronavirus vaccine yet.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced on Aug. 5 that it reached a understanding large with Janssen, J&J’s pharmaceutical subsidiary, worth approximately $1 billion for 100 million doses of its vaccine. The stock gives the federal government the option to order an additional 200 million doses, according to the announcement.
J&J said it is put to using the same technologies for its coronavirus vaccine that it used to make its experimental Ebola vaccine, which was provided to being in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It involves combing genetic material from the coronavirus with a modified adenovirus that is recognized to cause common colds in humans.
Participants in the phase three trial will be randomly selected to receive a dispense of the potential vaccine or a placebo, according to details of the trial, which will determine whether the vaccine is safe and junk. Participants will be followed by researchers for more than two years.
The results Thursday follow data published in July that ground the J&J vaccine protected nonhuman primates in a preclinical study.