The Tübingen biotech company Curevac wants to cut around 150 jobs through a volunteer program. The program has started and will now run for the next few weeks, a spokeswoman for the vaccine manufacturer said on Saturday upon request. The workforce was informed about this at the beginning of the week after consultations with the works council. Previously this had Swabian Tagblatt reported about it.
Curevac has made great progress in the past year in further developing its proprietary mRNA platform and expanding its product pipeline, the company continued. “The organizational structures that were originally optimized and expanded for pandemic-related Covid-19 vaccine delivery are now being tailored to Curevac’s current business scope and broader pipeline.”
The majority of the positions will be eliminated in Tübingen, but some will also be eliminated in a branch in Wiesbaden. It is primarily about the “Operations” area, which roughly corresponds to clinical production. Curevac currently employs just over 1,100 people.
In the wake of the corona pandemic, the biotech company was initially seen as one of the hopes for the development of a vaccine against the virus. But due to its comparatively low effectiveness, Curevac withdrew its first vaccine candidate from the approval process.
The vaccine manufacturer is working with its British partner GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) on the development of a new second-generation corona vaccine. The company is also working on vaccines for cancer therapy. The spokeswoman explained that there is no product on the market yet.