Shares of CureVac were up about 25% on Monday after its CEO Franz-Werner Haas said in an interview with German financial news site Boerse Online over the weekend that he hopes the vaccine will be approved by regulators early next year. Haas added that even an “accelerated approval was possible”. The stock had initially risen more than 40% Monday morning.
CureVac recently received approval from the governments of Germany and Belgium to begin clinical trials for one of its Covid-19 vaccines.
CureVac is also backed by billionaire Dietmar Hopp, co-founder of German software giant sop (sop).
Hopp owns almost half of CureVac. The German government and Big Pharma leader GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)also have large stakes in the company. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invested $ 40 million in 2015 in CureVac.
CureVac has had a development and intellectual property agreement with Tesla since November 2015, according to director filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Musk tweeted last month that Tesla’s German Grohmann division was helping build molecular prints for CureVac – a “side project” that Tesla could expand to include other pharmaceutical companies.
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