Our commitment to the safety and well-being of children has been a cornerstone of Johnson & Johnson’s work for over 130 years, and we are committed to continue improving medical innovation for children.
Our dedicated Child Health Innovation Leadership Department, or CHILD, was created with this focus in mind. As part of the Office of the Chief Medical Officer (OCMO), CHILD brings scientific excellence, bioethics and values-driven decision-making to children’s healthcare. The CHILD team works to understand the safety and effectiveness of our products in children and to accelerate policies driven by the needs of our youngest patients.
Half of all medicines used to treat children today do not have any information on their labels about proper use for children. In newborns, that number is approximately 90%. One of the reasons is that clinical trials for children are particularly challenging to design and conduct. As a result, there is a significant need for more information on the safety and effectiveness of products in younger patients to help regulators and healthcare practitioners make more informed decisions.
Johnson & Johnson aims to change this dynamic. Our CHILD team provides guidance to our Pharmaceutical, Consumer Health and Medical Device development teams to help overcome pediatric clinical trial design challenges, enable children-centered innovation and build a deeper understanding of diseases affecting newborns and children. This collaboration incorporates the best interests of children into all decision-making and ensures all of our operations are applied in a child-centered way.
Our work doesn’t end there. Johnson & Johnson works hand-in-hand with regulators, trade groups and other partners to inform child-centered regulatory policy. And we collaborate to change the paradigm for pediatric medical research to enable better-informed decisions by regulators and healthcare practitioners, so all children can live longer, healthier and happier lives.
In collaboration with the Critical Path Institute (C-Path), we co-led the creation of the Institute for Advanced Clinical Trials (I-ACT) for Children, a nonprofit organization that operates the first globally collaborative pediatric clinical trial network. Since 2016, we are co-leading efforts to develop a pan-European pediatric clinical trial network which we proposed to the Innovative Medicine Initiative (IMI) from the European Union. In 2018, IMI agreed to support the development of connect4children (c4c), a six-year project to create a pan-European clinical trial network by 2024 to facilitate the conduct of pediatric clinical trials in the European Union.
We do what we do for children because it is the right thing to do. Children’s physiology is unique, and child-centric innovation and therapies are necessary to achieve better outcomes in children.