The European Medicines Agency (EMA) announced, on Tuesday 12 October, that it is ending the rolling review of the Covid-19 CVnCoV vaccine developed by the pharmaceutical company CureVac.
“In its letter to EMA , the company stated that it withdrew because it decided to focus its efforts on a different Covid-19 vaccine development programme”, the EMA said, noting that CVnCoV had so far shown only modest efficacy (see EUROPE 12743/13).
The European Commission had concluded an advance purchase agreement with CureVac for 225 million doses of this vaccine (see EUROPE 12634/1). This agreement ‘will cease”, the pharmaceutical company said in a statement on Tuesday. However, it assured that it will remain in contact with the Commission.
The latter, for its part, is “examining the consequences” of this decision. “We are in the process of checking with our experts what this means for the future”, the Commission’s health spokesman, Stefan De Keersmaecker, told EUROPE on Wednesday 13 October.
The pharmaceutical company has made a “ strategic decision” to abandon its work on CVnCoV and move “towards the development of second generation mRNA vaccine candidates in collaboration with GSK”.
It justifies this decision by citing the “greater need for differentiated vaccines” to address the changing situation, explaining that any approval of its first-generation CVnCoV vaccine would not have occurred until the second quarter of 2022 anyway.
By then, however, “the companies expect the candidates from the second-generation vaccine programme to have progressed to late-stage clinical development”, it adds.
CureVac and GSK themselves intend to begin clinical development of their improved vaccine - already dubbed CV2CoV - in the coming months, with the aim of obtaining regulatory approval to market it in 2022.
To see CureVac’s letter to the EMA: https://bit.ly/3lBoYqr (Original version in French by Agathe Cherki)