The company acquired rights from CureVac to develop vaccines for influenza and COVID-19 using the mRNA platform.
Earlier this month, GSK and CureVac, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, announced they have restructured their existing collaboration into a new licensing agreement, allowing each company to prioritize investment and focus their respective mRNA development activities.1
With the new agreement, GSK will assume full control of developing and manufacturing these candidate vaccines. GSK will have worldwide rights to commercialize the candidate vaccines. The agreement represents the company’s ongoing investment in vaccine platform technologies. The mRNA is an adaptable vaccine technological platform with demonstrated application in emerging and constantly changing viral pathogens due to its ability to support rapid strain change. GSK continues to develop and optimize its mRNA capabilities through investments and partnerships, including in AI/ML-based sequence optimisation, nanoparticle design and manufacturing.1
We are excited about our flu/COVID-19 programs and the opportunity to develop best-in-class mRNA vaccines to change the standard of care,” Tony Wood, Chief Scientific Officer, GSK said in a statement. “With this new agreement, we will apply GSK’s capabilities, partnerships and intellectual property to CureVac’s technology, to deliver these promising vaccines at pace.”1
According to a news statement, CureVac will receive an upfront payment of 400 million euros and up to an additional 1.05 billion euros in development, regulatory and sales milestones and tiered royalties in the high single to low teens range. The new agreement replaces all previous financial considerations from the prior collaboration agreement between GSK and CureVac. CureVac further retains exclusive rights to the additional undisclosed and preclinically validated infectious disease targets from the prior collaboration together with the freedom to independently develop and partner mRNA vaccines in any other infectious disease or other indication.
It is important to note that CureVac’s ongoing patent litigation against Pfizer/BioNTech is unaffected by the new agreement.
Headquartered in Tübingen, Germany, CureVac is a multinational biotech company that was founded in 2000 to advance the field of mRNA technology for application in human medicine. In more than two decades of developing, optimizing, and manufacturing this versatile biological molecule for medical purposes, CureVac has introduced and refined key underlying technologies that were essential to the production of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19, and is currently laying the groundwork for application of mRNA in new therapeutic areas of major unmet need.1
GSK and CureVac have restructured their existing collaboration into a new licensing agreement.
Under the new agreement, GSK will assume full control over developing and manufacturing the candidate vaccines, and will have worldwide commercialization rights.
CureVac will receive an upfront payment of 400 million euros, and could receive up to an additional 1.05 billion euros in milestones and royalties.
In recent years, the company has been utilizing its mRNA platform to develop a COVID-19 vaccine candidate, CVnCoV. 2
In previous reporting by Contagion, data reported from a phase 2b/3 trial, the CVnCoV vaccine demonstrated an interim vaccine efficacy of 47% against COVID-19 disease of any severity. The trial included 40,000 participants from 10 countries in Europe and Latin America and was conducted in partnership with the multinational pharmaceutical and life sciences company Bayer.2
At the interim analysis, the therapy did not meet prespecified statistical success criteria.
In terms of this new licensing agreement, completion of the new agreement remains subject to certain antitrust and regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.
“The collaboration with GSK has been instrumental in developing promising, late clinical-stage vaccine candidates, leveraging our proprietary mRNA platform. This new licensing agreement puts us in a strong financial position and enables us to focus on efforts in building a strong R&D pipeline,” said CureVac CEO Alexander Zehnder.1
