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German company CureVac announced on Tuesday that it is withdrawing the mRNA vaccine for Covid-19 from its European approval process. The company pulled the plug after it determined it could take until June for regulators to make a decision on the vaccine.
With Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech’s other mRNA vaccines already in wide distribution, the company decided it was time to abandon its initial efforts to address the Covid-19 emergency.
“The pandemic window is closing,” Franz-Werner Haas, CureVac’s CEO, said in an interview.
The company will also terminate its preliminary agreement with the European Commission to sell 405 million doses of the vaccine after approval.
But in the long run, CureVac is not out of the Covid-19 vaccine business. The company is partnering with pharmaceutical giant GSK to start a clinical trial of a new version of the vaccine they hope will be more effective. Companies are also exploring how to combine seasonal booster vaccines to work against both Covid-19 and influenza.
Founded 20 years ago, CureVac He led Early research on mRNA vaccines with German company BioNTech and US company Moderna. At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, all three companies developed new vaccines against the coronavirus.
While Moderna and BioNTech were rapidly entering clinical trials, they were slower to find partners to support the development of the CureVac vaccine. However, some experts have shown promise in the CureVac vaccine, hoping it could help fill the global shortage in Covid vaccines.
The European Medicines Agency has reduced the time required for authorization by giving CureVac special priority to its implementation. However, in June the company disappointing announcement: A clinical trial found that the effectiveness of the vaccine was only 48 percent. By comparison, BioNTech and Moderna’s vaccines had around 95 percent efficacy.
Despite this disappointment, CureVac continued its European authorization application and submitted a final data package in September. In its updated app, CureVac wanted the vaccine to be considered only for people aged 18 to 60. in that group, the clinical trial found a moderately higher vaccine efficacy of 53 percent.
The reaction of European regulators was not encouraging. The company’s chief development officer, Dr. “We weren’t queuing up for emergency investigation,” said Klaus Edvardsen.
CureVac’s Covid-19 vaccine has become the seventh vaccine abandoned after entering clinical trials. Last month, Sanofi announced He was giving up the mRNA vaccine.
But the newer version of CureVac may be more successful. In August, the company shared the results of a study. experiment shows that on monkeys, the new vaccine produces 10 times more antibodies to the coronavirus than the original vaccine. CureVac will begin testing in humans in the next few months.
Dr. Haas said the company’s strategy is now “to be fast in the second generation rather than being too late in the first generation.”
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