J&J To Expand Manufacturing Capabilities For COVID-19 Vaccine Candidate

(RTTNews) - Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) and Emergent BioSolutions have collaborated to support the manufacturing of Johnson & Johnson's lead investigational COVID-19 vaccine candidate.

The collaboration will accelerate Johnson & Johnson's goal to supply more than one billion doses of the vaccine globally.

As per the terms of the deal, Johnson & Johnson will invest to expand drug substance capacity related to the vaccine candidate.

Emergent will provide drug substance manufacturing services with its molecule-to-market CDMO offering, beginning in 2020, and will also reserve operations capacity to potentially support commercial manufacturing of Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine candidate leveraging Janssen's AdVac and PER.C6 technologies beginning in 2021.

Johnson & Johnson has already begun preparations for clinical vaccine production at its facility in Leiden, the Netherlands, with the aim of initiating Phase 1 human clinical studies of its vaccine candidate in September 2020.