Johnson & Johnson Makes Late Entrance to Ebola Vaccine Race

“Symptoms of Ebola” by Mikael Häggström – own work. Source information: Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

New Jersey-based Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) made headlines Tuesday after announcing the start of a Phase I, first-in-human clinical trial of a preventive Ebola vaccine. It’s being led by the Oxford Vaccine Group, which is part of the University of Oxford’s Department of Paediatrics, and the first volunteers have already received their initial dose. 

However, since the release of the news, those in the industry have been questioning whether the vaccine has come too late. After all, as Bloomberg points out, Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine is the third such vaccine to enter the market — it follows one from GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE:GSK,LSE:GSK) and another from Merck & Co. (NYSE:MRK) and NewLink Genetics (NASDAQ:NLNK).

For its part, GlaxoSmithKline noted in a November 2014 press release that the first results of a Phase I trial show that its GSK/NIH Ebola candidate vaccine is “well-tolerated and produced an immunological response in each of the 20 healthy adult volunteers in the USA who received it.” The company said it was awaiting results from further Phase I trials and would proceed with the next clinical trial phases in early 2015; no further news appears to have been released since then.

Merck and NewLink’s path has been a little rockier. Like GlaxoSmithKline, they announced their foray into the Ebola vaccine space in November, stating that they had entered into an exclusive worldwide license agreement to research, develop, manufacture and distribute NewLink’s investigational rVSV-EBOV vaccine candidate. However, a trial for the vaccine was suspended in December after four out of 59 patients experienced pain in their hands and feet. It didn’t start up again until this week, according to Reuters, and a lower dose will be used moving forward.

All that said, those companies are still ahead of Johnson & Johnson in their work. Fortunately, Paul Stoffels, Johnson & Johnson’s chief scientific officer, isn’t particularly worried. He told Bloomberg on Monday, “[a]s long as there are still patients, there is a risk that it will continue. Does it come too late? That’s going to be answered when we are there. I don’t think so.”

He’s also not deterred by the fact that his company’s vaccine involves two shots, while the ones from GlaxoSmithKline and Merck and NewLink require one.

In terms of how Johnson & Johnson plans to proceed, Monday’s press release states that the company hopes to recruit 72 people for the trial by the end of January. It’s produced 400,000 regimens of the vaccine to be used in large-scale trials by April, and over the course of the year 2 million regimens will be available. If required, Johnson & Johnson will be able to raise that amount to as many as 5 million regimens.

No word as yet on pricing — Bloomberg quotes Stoffels as saying the shot “will be available for anyone who needs it.”

Other Ebola developments

The above news makes it clear that major life science companies are keen to find a vaccine for Ebola, but it’s important for investors to note that they’re not the only ones looking to fight the disease.

Indeed, Life Science Investing News has reported previously on Tekmira Pharmaceuticals (TSX:TKM,NASDAQ:TKMR), which saw its share price surge when Ebola entered the US. The company is behind TKM-Ebola, an anti-Ebola viral RNAi therapeutic that has been granted a “fast track” designation from the US Food & Drug Administration. Most recently, Tekmira announced at the end of December that it’s entered a manufacturing and clinical trial agreement with the University of Oxford; under the deal, it will provide a new therapeutic product, TKM-Ebola-Guinea, for clinical studies in West Africa.

Other players with news in the last couple of months include Novavax (NASDAQ:NVAX), which in October revealed its intention to launch a Phase I clinical trial for its Ebola vaccine candidate in December, and iBio (NYSEMKT:IBIO), which executed an agreement in November with Caliber Biotherapeutics to use the iBioLaunch platform to produce antibodies to target the Ebola virus. Meanwhile, news surfaced this week that NanoViricides (NYSEMKT:NNVC) is looking to move quickly to develop a cure for Ebola.

Those are of course just a few companies making moves in the space, and interested investors would do well to look into other options as well.

Securities Disclosure: I, Charlotte McLeod, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article. 

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Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Surges as Ebola Reaches United States