Research & Development

GSK and CureVac have announced that they have restructured their existing collaboration into a licence agreement, which is intended to allow both companies to prioritise investment and focus their respective mRNA development programmes.

The initial collaboration began in 2020, when the two companies began working together to develop mRNA vaccines for infectious diseases. Through this work they currently have vaccine candidates for seasonal influenza and COVID-19 in phase 2 and avian influenza in phase 1 clinical development.

Under the terms of the new agreement, GSK will have full control of the development and manufacturing of these vaccine candidates, as well as the worldwide rights to commercialise the candidates, representing GSK’s latest investment in its vaccine platform technologies. CureVac will receive an initial upfront payment of €400m as well as up to an additional €1.05bn in development, regulatory and sales milestones, and tiered royalties in the high single to low teens range.

Alexander Zehnder, chief executive officer at CureVac, stated: “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.” 

Tony Wood, chief scientific officer at GSK, commented: “We are excited about our flu/COVID-19 programmes and the opportunity to develop best-in-class mRNA vaccines to change the standard of care. 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.” 

The new agreement by the two companies replaces all prior financial considerations from their previous collaboration.