Curevac shares fell 60% after disappointing results from its COVID-19 vaccine

The shares of the German biotechnology company CureVac NV dropped up to 50% in pre-opened moves, after reporting on Wednesday evening that its COVID-19 vaccine had missed its primary target in an advanced stage trial, raising questions about the possible delivery of hundreds of millions of doses to the European Union.

The stock market value in the United States (Nasdaq) tear down below $ 40, whereas it traded at $ 100 10 days ago. This way it returned to the levels it had in November, when it was in the early stages of research, which looked promising. All the expectations and speculations accumulated in seven months collapsed in a few hours.

On the Frankfurt stock exchange (Germany), it trades with a drop of 45% to 43 euros, even if sometimes the collapse has reached 60%.

“While we would expect a more solid intermediate result, we recognize that it is difficult to demonstrate high efficacy in this unprecedented wide variety of variants. As we move towards the final analysis, with a minimum of 80 additional cases, the overall effectiveness of the vaccine may change.Said CEO Franz-Werner Haas.

The formula has achieved a preliminary overall efficacy of 47%, so it does not meet pre-established statistical criteria for success, the company said in a statement. The company added that interim results suggest the vaccine is effective in younger participants, but not in those over 60, the age group most at risk for severe COVID-19.

After the news, Some competitors developing vaccines have made “pre-market” gains: Novavax was up 3.4%, while BioNTech (which developed the Pfizer formula) was up 2.6%.

Bayer, which is collaborating with CureVac on the development of the vaccine, guaranteed that it would continue to support it despite the low efficacy and rose 0.5%, to 53.51 euros.

The vaccine developed by CureVac uses the same Messenger RNA technology, which is also used by Pfizer / BioNtech and Moderna.

The stakes for CureVac and potential buyers of its vaccine in Europe have risen after age limits were imposed on the use of the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines, due to a link to extremely rare bleeding disorders but potentially fatal. .

The injection of CureVac was also expected to play an important role in low- and middle-income countries, which fell far behind in the global immunization campaign.

(With information from EFE, AFP and Reuters)

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