Leading drugmaker Johnson & Johnson announced Wednesday that it has made a commitment of up to $200 million to speed up production of an Ebola vaccine.

The New Jersey-based company plans to test its vaccine for safety and immune response in healthy volunteers in Europe, the US and Africa beginning in January.

The company said 250,000 vaccines will be released for “broad application” in clinical trials by May. It also plans to collaborate with Britain’s GlaxoSmithKline, which would allow the companies to manufacture millions of doses next, according to Reuters.

“We are urgently working to provide our vaccine expertise, production capabilities, our people and resources to address the Ebola crisis,” Alex Gorsky, chairman and CEO of Johnson & Johnson, said in a statement.

The announcement comes a day after the World Health Organization said vaccines will be ready for experimental use by January if data shows they are safe by the end of this year.

Clinical trials in Europe, Africa and the US are being accompanied by a push among governments for “real-world” use of an approved vaccine, Dr. Marie Paul Kieny, WHO’s assistant general for health systems and innovation, said Tuesday.

Paul Stoffels, Johnson & Johnson’s chief scientific officer, said the two companies would support each other’s work and could combine their vaccines, while other companies without an Ebola treatment are ready to provide production capacity.

There is currently no proven vaccine against the deadly disease but several companies are racing to develop products. Clinical tests on GSK’s vaccine and another from NewLink Genetics are under way.

“I have spoken with (GSK chief executive) Andrew Witty over the past few days several times as colleagues on how we are going to solve this,” Stoffels told reporters. “It might even be that we have to combine their vaccine with ours.”

The J&J vaccine was discovered in collaboration with the U.S. National Institutes of Health and includes technology from Denmark-based Bavarian Nordic.