Second attempt
Curevac is pushing ahead with corona vaccine plans
02/12/2022, 2:11 p.m
In the first attempt, Curevac failed with the development of a corona vaccine. Now the Tübingen-based company wants to advance a second-generation vaccine: “It can’t be that a booster vaccination should be necessary every three months,” says Curevac boss Haas.
The Tübingen biotech company Curevac is sticking to its plans for a second-generation corona vaccine. “We see that the approved vaccines are coming to the end of their potential. It cannot be that a booster vaccination should be necessary every three months,” said Curevac CEO Franz-Werner Haas of the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper”.
This time, Curevac is developing the new vaccine candidate together with the British pharmaceutical company GSK. On Friday, the drug was administered to a human test subject for the first time. No capital increase is necessary for product development, said Haas. “We have about one billion euros in the account. That’s enough liquid funds to push everything we have set out to do.” There will also be no job cuts.
Curevac failed at the first attempt with its vaccine candidate, the effectiveness was only 48 percent. The project was then stopped.
The New York Stock Exchange-listed company’s share price has fallen by around two-thirds since its IPO in August 2020. For a while, the biotech company was considered one of the great hopes in the development of a Covid 19 vaccine.
One of Curevac’s largest shareholders is the German state, which invested 300 million euros in the company in the summer of 2020. The new coalition in Berlin has clearly signaled “that it will stick to its commitment because, alongside Biontech, it counts us among the leading scientific companies in Europe in mRNA technology,” said Haas.