It's a new vaccine candidate that hasn't seen the finish line.
The German laboratory CureVac announced Tuesday the abandonment of the development of its first candidate vaccine against Covid-19, initially hopeful but whose effectiveness has proved disappointing, to focus on a new, more promising serum.
The company specializing in messenger RNA will "focus on the development of a vaccine against Covid-19 on the second generation" on which it is working with the British GSK and will therefore "withdraw" the current candidate from the procedure continuous review by the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
This "puts an end" to the pre-order agreement for 405 million doses with the European Union, specifies the laboratory, which however continues discussions with Brussels on the second generation of vaccine.
"The global fight against Covid-19 continues and we are determined to make a decisive contribution to it with a safe and effective vaccine" but "the requirements for an effective fight against the virus and the variants that appear have changed", explained Franz -Werner Haas, boss of CureVac, in a statement.
CureVac focuses on promising second-generation vaccine
The German laboratory announced in early July the final results of its large-scale clinical study which showed an efficacy of only 48%, a rate much lower than other mRNA vaccines from the Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna alliance. CureVac and GSK want to launch “in the coming months” the clinical study on the second generation vaccine, which takes more into account the variants, for approval “in the course of 2022 ″. An authorization for the first vaccine would also have been probable "at the earliest in the second quarter" of next year, the statement said.
"We welcome the fact that CureVac is focusing on the promising second generation vaccine", called CV2CoV, for which the first studies show "a clear improvement" compared to the first candidate, CVnCoV, affirms Rino Rappuoli, scientific director of GSK.
The biotech founded in 2000 by researcher Ingmar Hoerr, a pioneer in messenger RNA research, was among the first to embark on the vaccine race.