The U.S. drug maker Johnson & Johnson is expanding its trials by geography and type, as part of which it had launched a new late-stage trial to test a two-dose regimen of its experimental COVID-19 vaccine among thousands of volunteers in the United Kingdom.
Saul Faust, a professor of paediatric immunology and infectious diseases who is co-leading the trial at University Hospital Southampton, said that the UK arm of the study is seeking to recruit 6,000 participants among a total of 30,000 people globally, who will be recruited at 17 sites across the UK and will be given a first dose of either a placebo or the experimental shot, currently called Ad26COV2, followed by a second dose or placebo 57 days later.
It must be noted that J&J, in August this year, had signed an agreement with the British government for the two-dose global Phase III clinical trial to run in parallel with a 60,000-person trial of a single shot of the experimental vaccine which was launched in September.
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