Status: 04/11/2022 5:35 p.m
Since the first corona vaccine was stopped, CureVac had been quiet. The Tübingen company is now working on a new vaccine – for which the federal government has secured the option for millions of doses.
A good six months ago, the Tübingen-based biotech company CureVac suffered a severe setback. The vaccine candidate “CVnCoV” was stopped and withdrawn from the approval process due to a lack of effectiveness. Since then, the Swabians have been working on a second attempt. Together with the British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), CureVac wants to develop a second-generation vaccine. It is said to help against various corona variants and also against other infectious diseases. The phase 1 study with up to 210 subjects has recently started. The first data on this should be published in the second half of this year.
Although it will still be a long time before approval is obtained, even if the results are positive, this new vaccine has already found a prominent buyer. The federal government has secured 80 million doses of vaccine from CureVac and GSK under a long-term deal that runs until 2029. Following a so-called two-year qualification phase, the federal government will have access to CureVac’s production capacity in order to be able to quickly provide the necessary vaccine doses during the pandemic or future corona outbreaks.
Federal contracts also with four other companies
The federal government has concluded or intends to conclude such a long-term agreement with four other companies: with BioNTech, Celonic, IDT and Wacker/CordenPharma. The latter three companies also have not yet approved their vaccine.
The so-called pandemic preparedness agreements were negotiated by the Vaccine Production Task Force, which is based in the Ministry of Economic Affairs. From the contractually agreed date, the federal government pays the companies an annual amount for having a certain production capacity available and for producing the agreed amount of vaccine if required. The contract with the five vaccine manufacturers costs taxpayers a total of almost three billion euros.
CureVac share price plummeted
“We have learned the lessons from the corona pandemic and the initial shortage of vaccines,” said Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck on the contracts. According to Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach, this is intended to ensure “that the population can be supplied with vaccines quickly in the future”.
As a co-owner, the federal government also has an interest in CureVac’s second vaccine candidate being a success. He currently still holds 16 percent of the shares in the Tübingen biotech company. It hasn’t paid off financially so far. Since the setback with the first vaccine candidate, CureVac’s share price has fallen by a good 80 percent.