Medical device company Johnson & Johnson on Friday said it plans to test its experimental coronavirus vaccine on people aged between 12 and 18 years as soon as possible, reported Reuters.
“We plan to go into children as soon as we possibly can, but very carefully in terms of safety,” Dr Jerry Sadoff, a vaccine research scientist at the company’s Janssen unit, said during a virtual meeting of the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. In a statement, the company said it was holding discussions with partners and regulators testing the vaccine on the 12-18 age group.
Sadoff added that the company plans to test the vaccine on younger children afterwards, depending on safety and other factors.
The US Food and Drug Administration has said that it was important to test the Covid-19 vaccine candidates on children. Some doctors had raised concerns that the vaccines could trigger Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome, a rare and life-threatening condition, in some children.
Johnson & Johnson uses a cold virus to deliver coronavirus genetic material to get an immune response. The platform, named AdVac, was approved in Europe earlier this year for use against Ebola and was performed on more than a lakh people, including infants, children and pregnant women.
Dr Paul Spearman, director of the infectious diseases division of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, said the technology’s history of safety should be important to regulators. “Most of the toxicities are going to come from the platform and not from putting a different insert into the platform,” he said, adding that replacing the Ebola genetic material with that of the novel coronavirus was not likely to result in any major problems.
Pharmaceutical company Pfizer has already begun testing its vaccine on children as young as 12 years.
Johnson & Johnson had begun its Phase 3 trials on adults in a 60,000-volunteer study in late September. It, however, had to pause the advanced clinical trial because of an unexplained illness in one of the volunteers, the company said on October 12.
Globally, the coronavirus has infected more than 4.54 crore people and killed 11,87,550, according to the Johns Hopkins University. Over 2.95 crore people have recovered from the infection.
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