Friday April 16, 2021
Astrazeneca and J&J debacle
Curevac vaccine met with great interest
Vaccine manufacturers Astrazeneca and Johnson & Johnson are pushing back reports of rare thrombosis. The Tübingen competitor Curevac jumps into the breach and registers worldwide buying interest. The vaccine has not yet been approved, but it appears to work against the South Africa mutation.
The biotech company Curevac sees increasing interest in its as yet unapproved vaccine in view of the problems with rare thromboses in other corona vaccines. “Much more vaccine is needed than is available,” said CEO Franz-Werner Haas in an analyst conference. The talks ran under high pressure. Curevac speaks mainly with governments, but also with the Covax vaccination initiative of the World Health Organization, which strives for a fair distribution of vaccines worldwide.
Curevac is on schedule for the project: data on the effectiveness of the vaccine are still expected this quarter. The application for a conditional marketing authorization with the European Union is also aimed for in the second quarter of the year. Curevac expects the end of May or the beginning of June, as a spokesman confirmed. The EU has secured up to 405 million doses of the vaccine.
Like that from Biontech / Pfizer and Moderna, the agent is based on so-called messenger RNA (mRNA), which is supposed to convey information to human cells to fight pathogens. The vaccines from Astrazeneca and Johnson & Johnson, which are also approved in the EU, are vector vaccines that are based on a harmless cold virus and recently made headlines because of rare post-vaccination brain thromboses. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Wednesday that the Commission was currently negotiating vaccine orders for the coming years, with contracts with manufacturers of mRNA vaccines taking precedence.
Study on children planned
Curevac aims to produce up to 300 million doses of its vaccine by the end of 2021 and one billion by 2022. The company plans to expand its vaccine program to include three new studies on specific population groups that are due to start shortly. It is planned, for example, that the vaccine will also be tested on adolescents aged twelve to 17 years. It should also be checked whether the agent is compatible with established seasonal flu vaccines for a possible seasonal Covid-19 vaccination. In an additional study, the Curevac vaccine had proven complete protection against a fatal infection by the virus variant B.1.351, which first appeared in South Africa, it said.
Since Curevac has high spending on research and development, the operating loss in the past fiscal year rose by a good ten percent to almost 110 million euros. The turnover of the Tübingen-based company, in which the federal government holds around 16 percent through the KfW development bank, has meanwhile climbed from 17.4 to just under 49 million euros.
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