There’s a new stock of a small biotech with a promise vaccine for coronavirus now available to US investors. CureVac (NASDAQ: CVAC) held its initial public offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq stock market last week. And that IPO raised some eyebrows.
CureVac expected the IPO’s share price to be between $ 14 and $ 16. The actual IPO price reached the upper end of that range, but did not stay there long. CureVac stock opened at $ 44 per share on Friday, almost three times higher than its IPO price.
The biotech stock has given up some of its jaw-dropping first gains of the day. However, CureVac still claims a market cap of more than $ 12 billion. Here’s what you want to know about the company that is already bigger than rival coronavirus vaccine makers Inovio Pharma (NASDAQ: INO) en Novavax (NASDAQ: NVAX).
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An mRNA pioneer
Modern (NASDAQ: MRNA) has received a lot of attention from investors due to its advanced messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, but German biotech CureVac was already a pioneer in mRNA research a decade before Moderna was founded.
Scientists have known about mRNA for almost six decades. However, in part because mRNA is unstable, they did not immediately realize the therapeutic potential of the molecule. German doctoral student Ingmar Hoerr discovered that mRNA could be administered directly into tissue and used as a vaccine as therapy.
Hoerr continued with his doctorate and founded CureVac in 2000 to run with this discovery. CureVac became the first company in the world to successfully use mRNA for therapeutic purposes.
CureVac’s COVID-19 program
In January of this year, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) announced a partnership with CureVac to develop a new vaccine for coronavirus. CEPI, a public-private partnership focused on fighting infectious diseases, said it would fund up to $ 8.3 million for CureVac to accelerate the development, testing, and manufacturing of a coronavirus vaccine candidate.
CureVac made rapid progress. In June, the biotech received the green light to begin Phase 1 clinical trials of its mRNA coronavirus vaccine in Germany and Belgium. CureVac selected its vaccine candidate from several that the company evaluated in preclinical tests because of the high neutralizing antibody levels and T-cell responses generated in animal models. Both neutralizing antibodies and T cells are immune responses that could prove useful in triggering infection by the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
While CureVac joined an elite group of companies with COVID-19 vaccine candidates in clinical trials, it lagged well behind several other smaller biotechs. Inovio launched its Phase 1 study of DNA vaccine candidate INO-4800 in April. In May, Novavax launched a Phase 1/2 study of COVID-19 vaccine candidate NVX – CoV2373.
Other pipeline candidates
CureVac is not only focused on developing a vaccine for coronavirus. The company’s pipeline includes three other candidates in Phase 1 testing and various preclinical programs.
In January, CureVac announced positive interim results from its early-stage study of mRNA-based rabies vaccine candidate CV7202. All of the study participants who received two doses of the vaccine had antibody levels neutralizing above the threshold recommended by the World Health Organization.
CureVac also has some mRNA-based cancer immunotherapies in the early stage of development. It collaborated with Ludwig Cancer Research and Boehringer Ingelheim on BI 1361849 in the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer. The company’s CV8102 is being evaluated in a Phase 1 study as a potential treatment for advanced melanoma, adenoid cystic carcinoma (a rare type of cancer that starts in the glands), and cancers of the head and neck.
Worth to see
Why is CureVac rated harder than Inovio and Novavax despite being behind in the COVID-19 fax race? Part of the appeal could be that investors are liking the potential of CureVac’s mRNA technology. It does not matter that the German government has invested 300 million euros (around $ 356 million) in CureVac, a potential sign that the company could gain access to the large German market if its vaccine candidate is successful.
My opinion is that CureVac is worth looking at, but not a stock to buy at the moment. Not only is the company’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate lagging behind those of Inovio and Novavax. There are also two other mRNA COVID-19 vaccine candidates ahead of the CureVac candidate – one developed by Moderna and another developed by BioNTech en Pfizer. This hot German biotech may be bigger than some of its rivals, but it’s not necessarily better than they are.
