Belgium's Janssen Pharma to speed up production of Ebola vaccine

The pharmaceutical division of multinational Johnson & Johnson (J&J) has put up €200 million for its Belgian subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceutica to speed up production of a vaccine against the Ebola virus.

Janssen, based in Antwerp province, has been working on a preventive vaccine against Ebola with a variety of public health authorities, including the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the US and the World Health Organisation in Geneva.

Parent company J&J, meanwhile, has developed a vaccine together with Danish biotechnology company Bavarian Nordic, which has already been tested on monkeys. J&J told The Wall Street Journal that it would begin testing a combination of the Janssen and Bavarian Nordic vaccines on humans in January and, should it prove safe, could have 250,000 doses ready by May.

The grant would also allow Janssen to produce one million doses by the end of next year. “Our primary goal in this escalating Ebola epidemic is to  help governments protect the health of care providers and populations that have increased vulnerability to infection,” said Janssen’s chief scientific officer, Paul Stoffels.

“We are working as fast as we can,” added J&J’s CEO Alex Gorsky. “As a leading pharmaceutical company, we have a huge responsibility to do everything possible to meet the urgent needs of the medical community, to rein this sickness in and to save human lives.”

photo courtesy Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs