Chicago, July 30: Amid the reports of 4.5 million people affected from COVID-19 in the United States, Johnson & Johnson on Thursday initiated US human safety trials for its COVID-19 vaccine. The coronavirus vaccine trials were kicked off after study in monkeys showed J&J's best-performing vaccine candidate offered strong protection in a single dose.

According to a report, published in Reuters, six out of six monkeys were found completely protected from lung disease. Also, five out of them were protected from infection after measuring the presence of the virus in nasal swabs, says the study published in the journal Nature. COVID-19 Vaccine Update: UK's Oxford-AstraZeneca Eyes September Rollout, Russia to Release 'Next Month', India's Covaxin In Clinical Trial Stage.

Aiming to test the COVID-19 candidate vaccine on humans, J&J’s chief scientific officer Dr Paul Stoffels said, as quoted by the news agency, "This gives us confidence that we can test a single-shot vaccine in this epidemic and learn whether it has a protective effect in humans."

It is to be known that the US government is backing J&J’s vaccine effort with $456 million in funding with an aim to speed production of a vaccine to end the pandemic. Dr Stoffels even claimed that a single-shot vaccine has a significant advantage over COVID-19 and reduces the logistical issues for people to come for the second dose.

J&J is now planning to begin large-scale phase 3 testing with a single-shot regimen in the second half of September. It would be done based on the results of phase 1 trial -- which started in the US this week. At the same time, J&J is also planning to begin parallel phase 3 study testing of a two-shot regimen of the vaccine.

During the study, scientists from J&J and Harvard’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center experimented seven different potential vaccines in 32 animals. Following this, they compared the results with 20 control animals who were injected the placebo shots. After six weeks, the results showed that all the 20 animals -- who received placebo shots -- developed high levels immune defence against the COVID-19 virus.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jul 30, 2020 05:19 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).