Positive study data
Ray of hope for Curevac – share price picks up again
1/9/2023 4:43 p.m
Curevac is repositioning itself at the top. The new combined vaccination against influenza and the corona virus seems promising. Analysts raise the price forecast significantly. Overall, the news on the stock market falls on fertile ground.
The Tübingen biotech company Curevac is giving investors good news again after a long time and is in demand on the stock exchange. The background to this is recently reported positive study data on vaccination against viral flu and Covid-19. In addition, there was a significant upgrade of the papers and a change at the top of the company. In US trading, shares are up more than a quarter.
Curevac has long been a great beacon of hope in the development of a Covid 19 vaccine. The investor and SAP co-founder Dietmar Hopp had promised rapid success. But that didn’t happen. The vaccine did not work as well as hoped and the project was stopped. The Tübingen-based company is now working with the British pharmaceutical company GSK on an improved vaccine that is in the early phase of clinical development. The study data now presented paved the way for further clinical studies, it said.
Another driver is currently the fact that Jefferies has upgraded the share from “hold” to “buy” and at the same time massively increased the target price from $9 to $21. In December 2020, the paper had cost more than 100 euros.
Sanofi manager is coming
The biopharmaceutical company has also announced that Sanofi manager Alexander Zehnder will take over as CEO on April 1st. Franz-Werner Haas is stepping down after more than ten years as a board member and after three years as CEO.
Zehnder is currently global head of the oncology business at Sanofi and previously held various management positions at the French pharmaceutical company and the Swiss Roche group. “Throughout his international career, Dr. Zehnder has been instrumental in bringing transformative medicines to market,” said Curevac Chairman Jean Stéphenne. Zehnder is the right person “to take Curevac to the next level as a relevant company in the market.”
In November, after the third quarter, Curevac reported that the cost of the failed 2021 corona vaccine continued to affect its business. For the first nine months, the company recorded a pre-tax loss of 120.4 million euros. Revenue fell to 55.7 million euros – around six million euros less than in the same period last year. “For the first time since the fourth quarter of 2021, we are no longer confronted with the challenges associated with the settlement costs of our first-generation vaccine candidate, CVnCoV,” said CFO Pierre Kemula.