CureVac to press on with mRNA vaccine despite disappointing trials

CureVac’s chief financial officer said the company had not given up on its coronavirus vaccine despite disappointing results from trials, with hope remaining that the jab might be targeted at some parts of the population.

Interim findings from CureVac’s late-stage trial suggested that the vaccine had only 47 per cent efficacy, but Pierre Kemula said the company believed a final analysis could confirm the jab could be offered to certain age groups or as a booster.

“There is a lot of need for vaccine out there,” Kemula told the Financial Times on Thursday. “We will define [ . . .] hand in hand with the agencies where the sweet spot of the vaccine is.”

Early in the pandemic, Europe had pinned high hopes on CureVac, based in the south-western German city of Tübingen. The German government bought 23 per cent of the company to stave off concerns it could move to the US. But since then, it has fallen behind other producers of mRNA vaccines, with Moderna, BioNTech and Pfizer beating it to the market.

The latest data came from a study of 40,000 people in 10 countries across Latin America and Europe. CureVac argued that the results could not be compared with those of other vaccine producers, whose jabs did not come up against as many variants.

Kemula said CureVac was not willing to drop its treatment without sifting through the completed data from the final study, which will analyse 200 cases of coronavirus contracted in the trial.

But real-world evidence and lab studies from other big vaccine makers suggested those jabs have handled variants better than CureVac’s.

CureVac had aimed to produce 300m doses of its vaccine this year and 1bn in 2022 and had a partnership with Bayer to do so. Shares in the group, which investors have raced to back since it listed on Wall Street in August 2020, plunged as much as 50 per cent on Thursday after the company released the data late the previous day.

Although the trial results threw the viability of those projects into doubt, they were not necessarily bad news for a next-generation vaccine CureVac is developing with GlaxoSmithKline aimed at tackling variants. But Kemula said the company at this stage was not considering dropping its first candidate drug to focus on the second. 

“We are so close. We are two, three weeks away from final data . . . If we have something, then, of course, we will leverage it,” he said. “We need to look at the data and see, OK, what would be the best value, how we can place this vaccine to make this available.”

Chief technical officer Mariola Fotin-Mleczek told the Financial Times that one of the variants, the Lambda strain first detected in Peru, made up 21 per cent of infections but was still so unknown there was very little information on it. 

“This is not available because it’s really new,” she said. “And if you ask different labs, nobody’s heard about this.”

As with the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, CureVac’s jab uses messenger ribonucleic acid, but its mRNA is unmodified and uses lower doses — 12 microgrammes compared with Moderna’s 100mcg and Pfizer’s 30mcg. This would result in a lower cost of production and be stable at conventional fridge temperatures. 

Fotin-Mleczek declined to speculate on whether the interim findings suggested low doses were not as viable, citing the variants as a bigger factor and the fact that initial studies of its second-generation vaccine were still promising.

Early data showed an increase of up to tenfold in immune response compared with the first-generation treatment. CureVac and GSK aim to make the jab available in 2022.