2020_06_Blues_Final_Reduced

THE GOOD
FIGHT
With unprecedented speed, Garden State
researchers seek ways to strike down Covid-19.
By Leslie Garisto Pfaff
PHOTOGRAPHS: (SUBJECT) NAME HERE; (SUBJECT) NAME HERE
fter new york, no state had been harder
hit by the Covid-19 pandemic than New
Jersey. So it’s fitting—given both our sense
of urgency and our wealth of medical
and scientific resources—that the
state is deeply engaged in the global
effort to vanquish the disease. From
vast pharmaceutical and research
powerhouses like Johnson & Johnson and Rutgers
University to a small biotech company with a
single focus, New Jersey scientists are playing
an essential role in the search for ways to treat
patients suffering from Covid-19 and to stop the
disease in its relentless march across the globe.
THE PUSH FOR A VACCINE
When Paul Burton, the chief global medical affairs
officer of Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen pharmaceuticals
division, talks about the company’s
efforts to create a vaccine to protect against
Covid-19, he uses words like “unprecedented” and
“unparalleled.”
Under other circumstances, those adjectives
might be dismissed as hyperbole, but in this case
they’re merely descriptive. Never before has the
search for a vaccine been so aggressive or so accelerated
(which, by the way, are also adjectives
Burton uses).
In the case of Covid-19, a process that can take
10-15 years is being squeezed into a span of 12-18
months. It began almost immediately after January
10, the date on which Chinese scientists announced
that they’d successfully decoded the genome of
SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.
Janssen was well positioned for such a challenge.
It had already developed successful vaccines for
Ebola and Zika, so it had in hand the technology to
create new vaccine candidates.
“Creating the new vaccine,” Burton says, “involves
taking a piece of the coronavirus DNA—specifically,
one that codes for the protein that latches onto human
cells—and placing it inside a dead adenovirus.”
An adenovirus, Burton explains, is basically a safe
common cold virus, which is good for transporting
things into humans, but it lacks the DNA needed to
replicate. “So, the vaccine”—essentially, the coronavirus
DNA and the dead adenovirus that contains it,
along with inert components the keep the vaccine
from degrading or its ingredients from separating—
”can’t cause a cold,” Burton says. “And the protein it
produces can’t cause harm either.”
For the hoped-for Covid-19 vaccine, Janssen
found three extremely promising pieces of coronavirus
DNA from which they’ve created three separate
vaccines: a lead candidate and two backups. After
a candidate is chosen, a series of clinical trials will
start. If the vaccine is found to be safe and efficacious,
manufacturing will ramp up.
What Janssen is doing—and as far as Burton
knows, this has never been done before the Covid-19
pandemic rendered the need for a vaccine so
urgent—is conducting various phases of vaccine development
in parallel, rather than in sequence. As
of this writing, the company was expecting to begin
Phase 1 trials as soon as September and was already
preparing for the manufacture of 300 million doses
of the vaccine, which could be delivered to the public
by the end of this year. “That,” says Burton, “is an
unprecedented timeline.”
Also unprecedented is the amount of collaboration,
both nationally and globally, on the creation
of this particular vaccine. J&J researchers in New
Jersey, across the country, and in Janssen’s facilities
in the Netherlands are all working on the vaccine,
along with scientists at BARDA—Biomedical
Advanced Research and Development Authority, a
branch of the federal government with which Janssen
already had a relationship—and a host of other
organizations around the world.
“When we do research, we definitely do it
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY VICKTOR KOEN
JUNE 2020 NEW JERSEY MONTHLY 45