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Curevac headquarters in Tübingen: poor interim result
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Sebastian Gollnow / dpa
The biotech company Curevac was able to record significantly more sales in the third quarter, but it also lost significantly more money in the process.
As the Tübingen-based company announced, sales rose by 463 percent to 29.3 million euros compared to the same period last year.
The increase in sales in the first nine months is still 44 percent.
The increase was mainly due to higher sales from the cooperation with the British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, it was said to justify.
The bottom line, however, was that the minus also grew significantly in the past quarter.
The operating loss increased from 36.7 million euros to 143.1 million euros.
The main reason the company named the higher research and development costs for "CVnCoV", the Covid-19 vaccine candidate of the first generation.
Curevac stopped development of the vaccine in October after poor study results.
Now Curevac is working on a second-generation Covid-19 vaccine. In a study with macaques, the new vaccine "CV2CoV" was compared directly with the Covid-19 vaccine from Biontech / Pfizer, as announced by Curevac. After vaccinating the monkeys with Curevac or Biontech, comparable neutralizing antibody levels could be measured, as can be seen from the study, which was published in the specialist journal Nature. The vaccine has yet to prove itself in clinical trials on humans.
The company now plans to focus on its second-generation vaccine program, which it is developing not alone this time, but together with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline.
In a preclinical study with monkeys, the new vaccine candidate showed an improved immune response and protective effect than the original version and achieved stronger antibody neutralization of all selected virus variants, including Delta.
Curevac expects the start of clinical development in the next few months and hopes to be able to apply for market approval in 2022.
mic / dpa-afx / Reuters
