The pharmaceutical group Johnson & Johnson announced on Monday, October 12, the suspension of its clinical trial for a vaccine against Covid-19 following the appearance of an unexplained illness in a participant.
- This suspension leads to the postponement of the recruitment of volunteers to conduct phase 3 clinical trials on the candidate vaccine.
- This type of discontinuation is common in phase 3 clinical trials.
- Johnson & Johnson is the 10th company in the world to conduct phase 3 clinical trials of a vaccine against Covid-19.
The race for the vaccine continues with its “incidents of course”. For the American pharmaceutical group Johnson & Johnson, it is a halt that was announced on Monday, October 12. In a statementthe company says it has “temporarily halted supplemental dosing in all of our clinical trials of an investigational Covid-19 vaccine, including the entire Phase 3 trial, due to unexplained illness in a participant”.
The independent committee for patient safety seized
This suspension leads to the postponement of the recruitment of volunteers to conduct phase 3 clinical trials on the candidate vaccine. The company hopes to enroll 60,000 participants at 200 sites across the United States and other countries including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and South Africa. The lab has received nearly $1.5 billion in funding from the US government as part of the White House-designed Operation Warp Speed to produce vaccines.
This type of halt in the research process for a vaccine is frequent during phase 3 clinical trials. This is “an expected component of any clinical study, especially large studies”, continues Johnson & Johnson. The independent committee for patient safety was contacted to find out more about the reasons that led to the appearance of an unexplained illness in one of the volunteers. Once this question has been answered, testing can resume. In early September, clinical trials conducted by the pharmaceutical group AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford were also put on hold for the same reason before resuming the following week.
The global vaccine race
Johnson & Johnson is the 10th global group to conduct phase 3 clinical trials of a vaccine against Covid-19. Behind it are 38 vaccine candidates that are in clinical trials for a total of 200 projects around the world. In the United States, in addition to Johnson & Johnson, the trials conducted by Moderna, Pfizer and Novavax are also in phase 3. In China, there are also at least four which are in the same stage (CanSino, Sinovac, and two by the Sinopharm group). There are also the Russians who are present in this race with the Gamaleya Research Institute group. In Europe, the most advanced are AstraZeneca and Oxford, which resumed phase 3 trials last month after a one-week suspension due to an illness developed in a patient.
And Olivier Bogillot, the boss of Sanofi, announced on France info this Tuesday, October 13 hope “arrive with a vaccine for the middle of next year”. Clinical trials are currently in phase 3 but production of the vaccine is expected to occur before phase 3 results.”Quite simply because once we have the results of phase 3, if they are good, we will have gained at least that time to be able to make the vaccine available.“, he justified.
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