Johnson & Johnson expects to share clinical trial results for its much-anticipated one-dose COVID-19 vaccine candidate "very soon," company CEO Alex Gorsky said Monday.
Johnson & Johnson last year enrolled 45,000 patients into a phase three clinical trial for its vaccine candidate. Those patients are still being monitored.
"We're in the final stages of that analysis as we speak," Gorsky said at J.P. Morgan's annual healthcare conference. "We hope to have that information very soon."
Johnson & Johnson has committed to distributing the vaccine on a not-for-profit basis, according to Gorsky, as well as distributing to lower-income markets internationally.
While the pharmaceutical business accounts for just over half of the company's revenue, Gorsky said Johnson & Johnson plans to build on some of its medical device work this year, including plans to accelerate the rate of tuck-in acquisitions and level of investment into its medical technology segment. Gorsky referenced Auris Health, a digital surgery company Johnson & Johnson acquired for $3.4 billion in 2019, and Verb Surgical, a joint robotics project it launched with and subsequently acquired from Alphabet's Verily Life Sciences, as examples of its work so far.
In 2020's third quarter, the most recent period the company has released earnings results for, medical devices represented $6.1 billion in sales, or 29.2% of Johnson & Johnson's overall revenue—down 3.6% year-over-year.
"We're quite excited about the digital and robotic opportunity," Gorsky said of the company's surgical business. "We're not looking at (it) as a one- or two-year opportunity, but something that we see as something to influence that business for the next decade."
