CureVac wants to skip phase three clinical trials to get a coronavirus vaccine deployed, the German biotech company’s supervisory board chair has told Belgian media.
The company, which the Commission offered €80 million to invest in last month, is one of more than 30 companies racing to find a vaccine.
The company’s majority shareholder, Dietmar Hopp, has implied a vaccine would be on the market by autumn — a prediction echoed by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen but contradicted by regulators.
“All stages are underway” to start the first phase of clinical trials in June or July, Jean Stéphenne, the newly appointed chair of the company’s supervisory board and a former CEO of GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals (now GSK Vaccines), told L’Echo in an interview published Thursday.
That phase is the first test on humans and looks at the vaccine’s safety and dosage.
Afterward, the company plans to move to phase two and test the efficacy of the vaccine on 2,000 to 3,000 patients in Europe, he noted.
He said the company will discuss skipping phase three trials — larger scale efficacy tests — with scientists and regulators “to see if this vaccine should already be used.”
“I hope we can avoid [phase three] given the severity of the disease,” he said.
The company’s lead vaccine candidate is a messenger RNA vaccine, the same vaccine platform used by the U.S. biotech company Moderna, which began clinical trials in March.
There are no mRNA vaccines authorized against infectious disease, but Stéphenne said “this technology is very promising.”
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