CureVac: Head of technology turns her back on biotech companies

Created: 01/18/2022, 10:35 am

The technology head of the vaccine manufacturer CureVac is retiring.

© Martin Wagner/Imago Images

After the setback for the Corona vaccine CureVac, the company's head of technology is now retiring, as the Tübingen company announced.

Frankfurt – CureVac* technology head Mariola Fotin-Mleczek is leaving the biotech company.

The Tübingen company announced on Monday that she would retire from her position at the end of January after almost 16 years of scientific management at CureVac.

CureVac: boss wants to build family businesses in Poland

In her home country of Poland, Fotin-Mleczek wants to set up a family business outside of the biotech industry. Fotin-Mleczek has been with CureVac since 2006, was appointed to the board in 2013 and was responsible for the development and preclinical testing of the company's mRNA technology platform in the areas of prophylactic vaccines, oncology and molecular therapy. In the future, Chief Scientific Officer Igor Splawski will lead the further development of CureVac's mRNA technology.

In the first Corona * year, the Tübingen-based company was at the forefront of developing a first vaccine - in the meantime, the biotech company Curevac has become quite quiet. After the vaccine candidate CVnCoV withdrew from the approval process due to comparatively weak effectiveness, Curevac does not want to suffer shipwreck again and is planning “a pioneering role” in the development of a new second-generation vaccine with its British partner GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). The goal: The new vaccine* should, among other things, offer longer-lasting protection against new variants in a single vaccination.

For weeks, several pharmaceutical companies have been investigating whether their vaccines need to be adapted to the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, which is spreading more and more rapidly.

The vaccines were originally developed against the so-called wild type of Sars-CoV-2, which was first discovered in China at the end of 2019.

While the agents used since the turn of the year 2020/2021 also showed their effect against later virulent mutants such as Alpha or Delta, things could be different with Omikron.

Corona variant Omikron: Biontech and Moderna adapt their vaccines

In particular, the manufacturers of the mRNA preparations, Biontech*/Pfizer and Moderna, have been advertising the possibility of being able to quickly adapt them to virus changes since the beginning of their vaccines, which were used for the first time.

Both have been preparing their funds for possible mutations of the corona virus for months - including with clinical tests.

"These studies have shown that variant vaccines are tolerated just as well and show symptoms similar to the original vaccine against the wild type," said Biontech founder Ugur Sahin recently.

Company founder Özlem Türeci recently assumed that the first commercial batches of a special Omicron vaccine could be available in March - and then millions of them.