Johnson & Johnson JNJ.N said on Wednesday it was halting a late-stage global trial of an HIV vaccine after the injection proved ineffective in preventing infections.
The failure of the trial marks another setback in the search for a vaccine against a virus known to mutate quickly and find unique ways to evade the immune system, and comes more than a year after another J&J HIV vaccine failed in a trial.
“This is not the outcome we were hoping for, unfortunately,” said a spokesman for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), J&J’s partner in the trial.
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“Developing a safe and effective HIV vaccine is a significant scientific challenge, but we will learn from this study and move forward.”
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The trial involved administering two different types of injection, which use a virus that causes the common cold to deliver the genetic code of HIV, spread over four vaccination visits over a year. J&J is using similar technology for its COVID-19 vaccine.
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The study, which began in 2019, was conducted in more than 50 locations and included about 3,900 gay men and transgender people – groups considered vulnerable to the infection.
3:07 A specialist hospital for people living at risk of HIV
Another J&J partner, the HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN), said the vaccination is only being tested on people who have not taken pre-exposure prophylaxis, a treatment to prevent infection. In 2021, about 650,000 people died of HIV-related causes, while 1.5 million people became infected, according to the World Health Organization. Various HIV vaccine candidates, including from Moderna Inc MRNA.O, HVTN and NIAID, are currently being tested.
Although no HIV vaccine has successfully passed trials so far, some drugs are used in high-risk groups and patients.
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J&J shares fell 1.3 percent to $170.14 in morning trading.
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