Leading drugmakers plan to work together to accelerate development of an Ebola vaccine and produce millions of doses of the most effective experimental product for use next year.
Johnson & Johnson said yesterday that it aims to produce at least 1 million doses of its two-step vaccine next year and has already discussed collaboration with Britain’s GlaxoSmithKline, which is working on a rival vaccine.
The US group’s head of research Paul Stoffels said the two companies would support each other’s work and could combine their vaccines if that made sense, while other companies without an Ebola treatment are ready to provide production capacity.
There is currently no proven vaccine against the deadly disease but several companies are racing to develop products. Clinical tests on GSK’s vaccine and another from NewLink Genetics are under way, while human tests on J&J’s vaccine will start in January.
The World Health Organization (WHO) hopes that tens of thousands of people in West Africa, including frontline healthcare workers, can start receiving Ebola vaccines from January as part of large-scale clinical trials.
“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,” Stoffels told reporters. “It might even be that we have to combine their vaccine with ours.”
J&J said the accelerated work on its Ebola vaccine, which has been helped by recent advances in technology, would yield 250,000 doses by May.
The company plans to test its vaccine for safety and immune response in healthy volunteers in Europe, the United States and Africa from early January, having committed up to $200m to accelerate the programme.