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Curevac headquarters in Tübingen
Photo: Jürgen Held / IMAGO
The Tübingen biotech company Curevac is giving up its first corona vaccine candidate.
The company announced that it will now focus on a second-generation corona vaccine in collaboration with the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline.
Clinical studies are scheduled to begin here in the next few months.
The pandemic is developing into an endemic, which is changing public health needs, said Curevac boss Franz-Werner Haas.
The first generation CVnCoV, on the other hand, will be withdrawn from the ongoing approval process, it said.
This also ends the preliminary contract with the European Commission.
Curevac is examining to what extent the commitments made in this context could also be transferred to the second-generation vaccine candidates.
The decision was not well received by the stock market.
The shares fell by almost 15 percent.
In September, Curevac announced that the production network for the first vaccine would be reduced. Curevac's corona vaccine CVnCoV had previously performed disappointingly in studies. According to a final analysis, the Curevac preparation had shown an effectiveness of 48 percent against Covid 19 disease across all age groups. The Tübingen biotech company assumed at the beginning of July that Ema would approve the vaccine.
The federal government originally planned the Curevac vaccine for the vaccination campaign.
The federal government also has an indirect 16 percent stake in Curevac through the KfW state bank.
In this way, politicians wanted to secure the company against a possible takeover from abroad.
The SAP co-founder and investor Dietmar Hopp holds the largest share in the company.
The preparation of the Tübingen company is a so-called mRNA vaccine - like the products of the competitors Biontech / Pfizer and Moderna.
mmq / Reuters / dpa
