Johnson & Johnson is gearing up to test its potential COVID-19 treatment on up to 60,000 subjects in a large late-phase trial next month, the company said.
The phase-three trial will have healthy volunteers 18 years and older across almost 180 health centers in the U.S. and other countries, according to a Johnson & Johnson representative and ClinicalTrials.gov.
The main objective of the third-phase test is to be "as robust as possible" and it will be conducted in areas that have high rates of infection, Johnson & Johnson representative Jake Sargent said.
The pharmaceutical and consumer goods company will use epidemiological information to help its scientists determine where research must be undertaken. The company hopes to produce the first batch of COVID-19 drugs by early next year.
Johnson & Johnson is one of many biotech companies scrambling to come up with a safe and effective drug for the disease which has sickened more than 22.4 million people internationally and claimed the lives of around 788,500, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.
Currently 32 potential COVID-19 vaccines are undergoing human clinical tests - which include eight experimental drugs that have entered late-stage tests involving thousands of participants, according to reports.
Biotechnology companies Pfizer Inc. and Moderna have said they each had kick-started advanced-stage tests on an experimental medication. The two companies aim to enroll around 30,000 participants for their trials.
U.S. President Donald Trump's administration's Operation Warp Speed COVID-19 vaccine program last week enrolled medical experts and scientists in Latin America and South Africa to help in the government's vaccine trials, Reuters reported.
Meanwhile, in a recent interview with Yahoo Finance, Harvard University vaccine researcher Dr. Dan Barouch said it was "theoretically possible" that a treatment for the coronavirus could be produced for emergency use this winter but that it won't become widely available until next year.
Barouch is the director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research and has partnered with Johnson & Johnson on the development of a COVID-19 drug.
