Incentives, IP and smaller companies: the story of CureVac

By 2050, the world’s population aged 60 years and older is expected to reach 2 billion – a vast leap from the 900 million elderly citizens living across the globe today. With increased longevity and lower birth rates changing the demography in Europe and around the world dramatically, the public health impact of age-related, as well as vaccine-preventable diseases, is growing steadily, notes a blog posting by the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA).

CureVac, a biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Tübingen, Germany, has developed an innovative technology for the easy and quick production of safe, efficacious and cost-effective immunotherapeutic agents for a wide range of diseases. CureVac has several vaccines in research and (pre-) clinical development for the treatment of cancer. Additionally, candidates for the prevention of infectious diseases, including an influenza vaccine, are in preclinical development, and a rabies vaccine is currently in a Phase I clinical trial with healthy volunteers. Adjuvant agents for vaccination are stable, have a good preclinical safety profile and enhance the effect of commercially-available vaccines in various animal models.

The pioneering technology and advanced, broad preclinical and clinical pipeline of the company is based on the initial discovery that – contrary to scientific belief at the time – the molecule RNA can be used as a vaccine or therapeutic agent. CureVac is the first company to successfully harness messenger RNA (mRNA) for medical purposes, using natural mRNA as a data carrier to instruct the human body to produce own proteins for fighting a wide range of diseases.