CureVac Receives Approval to Initiate Clinical Trial of SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine Candidate

The Belgian Federal Agency for Medicines and Health Products (FAMHP) has approved the Phase 1 clinical trial for CureVac’s vaccine program to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection. The trial will be conducted in Germany and Belgium. First subjects will be vaccinated at the Institute for Tropical Medicine in Tübingen and the Ghent University Hospital (Belgium), the Tropical Institute of the University Hospital Munich, LMU (Germany), and the Hannover Medical School (Germany).

CureVac´s mRNA vaccine candidate utilizes nucleotides without chemical modifications in the mRNA and is designed to provide a strong and balanced activation of the immune system. The mRNA encodes the full-length spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 and is formulated with lipid nanoparticles (LNP).

The Phase 1 dose escalation clinical trial will include 168 healthy subjects between the ages of 18 to 60 and will target a dose range of 2 μg to 8 μg. The aim is to determine the optimal dose as well as to evaluate the safety and immune profile of the vaccine in humans.

“We are encouraged that we received green light from the regulatory authorities to start the clinical development of our COVID-19 candidate. During the last few months our team has put a lot of efforts into the preclinical validation of several vaccine candidates to select an optimal construct. We are confident that our early optimization work will provide a safe and effective low dose vaccine. In parallel, we are already producing large quantities of this GMP-grade drug product,” stated acting CEO of CureVac, Dr. Franz-Werner Haas.

Dr. Mariola Fotin-Mleczek, CureVac chief technology officer, added, “We are convinced that we are on the right track with our SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidate. The data we generated in various animal models indicated that the vaccine candidate induces high virus neutralizing antibody titers compared to sera from patients who recovered from COVID-19 disease. Immune response induced by our vaccine candidate was well balanced and included the generation of spike protein specific T cell responses. We now look forward to confirm these results in humans.”