Janssen COVID-19 vaccine approved for use in EU on March 11

The African-European Tuberculosis Consortium (AE-TBC) is an international multisite group of African and European researchers who investigate the use of host biosignatures for the diagnosis of active TB disease. For over ten years, the LUMC groups of Infectious Diseases and Cell & Chemical Biology from Prof Annemieke Geluk and Dr Paul Corstjens respectively, have been partners of the EDCTP consortia for tuberculosis (among which AE-TBC). The AE-TBC recently won the prize for ‘Outstanding Research Team 2020, awarded by the EDCTP.

The Janssen-Cilag International N.V COVID-19 vaccine has received authorization for emergency use by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) on March 11. Developed with fundamental support from the Molecular Virology group of the Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC), it is the fourth vaccine to be administered in the European Union. The Netherlands has ordered more than 11 million vaccine doses.

Janssen first approached the LUMC Molecular Virology group in February of 2020. “A collaboration to support the development of the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine was proposed because they knew we had been studying coronaviruses for over 30 years”, says Professor Eric Snijder of the LUMC department of Medical Microbiology. Together, Snijder and Dr Marjolein Kikkert were responsible for leading the project. Snijder emphasizes that they were able to rapidly assist with the first phase of vaccine development and testing due to LUMC’s well-established research infrastructure: “not only did we have the experience, but we also had trained staff available and a state-of-the-art Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) laboratory”. 

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“This is an achievement in alignment with the mission of VODAN-Africa to generate continuous, real-time, high velocity clinical observational patient data from resource-limited communities that have not been well represented in digital health data. The key feature is that the data produced remains in the health facility only. It will not leave the health facility. Since the data is machine-actionable the input of the data only happens once; in the deployable architecture, the data is used for four parallel use cases” (VODAN to Africa, 2022).