Pharmaceuticals giant will help Germany's CureVac produce vaccine for COVID-19
- CureVac is one of the pioneers of mRNA technology next to American Moderna, and Novartis is a Swiss pharmaceutical company, one of the largest in the world
- Novartis is expected to produce about 50 million doses of the vaccine created by CureVac. The German company in December began phase III clinical trials of the product.
- The head of technology at CureVac is Polish, Dr. Mariola Fotin-Mleczek.
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Novartis - a Swiss pharmaceutical company, one of the largest in the world - will produce a vaccine for COVID-19, created by the German company CureVac. The agreement signed by the companies calls for the production of tens of millions of doses of the vaccine by the end of 2021. The work on the CureVac vaccine is supervised by a Pole - Dr. Mariola Fotin-Mleczek.
Novartis and CureVac. Cooperation on COVID-19 vaccine
Novartis and CureVac's agreement is to produce 50 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine by the end of 2021. Although the formulation has not yet received FDA approval in the United States or the European Commission, the German company is on track to receive it. If approved, CureVac's vaccine will be another mRNA-based formulation on the market - similar to Pfizer and Moderna's products.
The European Union already has an initial agreement with CureVac to purchase the vaccines - for 225 million doses. But first, clinical trials must confirm that the vaccine is effective and safe. The third - and final - phase of clinical trials for the German company's vaccine began in December.
The mRNA vaccine - a new generation - against coronavirus. How it works.
CureVac is pioneering work on mRNA technology. The head of technology (including science) in CureVac is a Pole, Dr. Mariola Fotin-Mleczek, whose story we first described in Business Insider Polska.
The mRNA vaccines introduce into our cells only the information about what protein from the virus and how it should be produced to make antibodies. The cells themselves thus produce a protein that is recognized as "foreign" and the body, in response to this information, can produce the appropriate antibodies to neutralize the protein. In the case of coronavirus, the protein in question is the famous "spike", which is responsible for infection - entering cells in the human body. Unlike traditional products, mRNA vaccines do not contain inactive viruses or their parts and, among others, for this reason, they are supposed to be safer.
All this is possible thanks to mRNA technology. Its operation was explained in an interview for BI Poland by Ingmar Hoerr, Ph.D., CEO of CureVac.
Americans wanted to buy CureVac, but investors stubbornly refused
In August 2020. CureVac debuted on the NYSE in New York - the company stock price increased by over 400% in the first two days of trading. The company was previously supported by multi-million dollar investments from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and SAP founder Dietmar Hopp. The company's capitalization is now over 11 billion dollars, but the road to success, as CEO Ingmar Hoerr told us, was long and winding.
The German biotech became particularly notorious in March 2020, when Donald Trump offered more than $1 billion to acquire CureVac and obtain a " US-only" vaccine. However, one of the key investors in the company - the aforementioned SAP founder Dietmar Hopp - firmly stated at the time that this was not an option.
CureVac is another company with which the EC has negotiated the purchase of vaccines. Earlier, the Commission reported that it had successfully concluded talks with other companies seeking vaccines for coronavirus: AstraZeneca, Sanofi-GSK, and Johnson & Johnson.
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