Curevac share: head of technology leaves biotech company

Frankfurt At the Tübingen Curevac, the upheaval continues with another prominent departure from the management floor. At the end of January, the previous head of technology, Mariola Fotin-Mleczek, will leave the company. Head of Science Igor Splawski, who came to Curevac from Novartis in 2020, is to take over her function. According to Curevac, Fotin-Mleczek wants to set up a family business outside of the biotech industry in her home country of Poland.

For the Tübingen biotech company, which failed to develop a Covid vaccine last year, this is the fifth change in the board of directors in the last year and a half.

In mid-2021, former Sanofi manager Malte Greune replaced company co-founder Florian von der Mülbe in the role of Chief Operating Officer. A month later, ex-Merck manager Klaus Edvardsen joined the Executive Board as Chief Development Officer. At the end of 2020, the former Glaxo Smithkline manager Antony Blanc was brought to Tübingen as “Chief Business Officer”.

The departure of Fotin-Mleczek is also likely to indirectly reflect the Tübingen company’s technological problems. The farewell is a further indication that the biotech company is facing a painful upheaval and is realigning both its management team and its research strategy.

The trained biologist Fotin-Mleczek worked for 16 years in the scientific management of the biotech company and was thus significantly involved in the further development of Curevac’s mRNA technology and the product candidates based on it.

Curevac needs to get away from the unmodified mRNA

In clinical development, however, Curevac has almost always failed with its own mRNA concepts. Both a larger study with a potential cancer vaccine, completed in 2017, and the large study with a Covid vaccine last year only delivered disappointing results. Both projects had to be abandoned. The pharmaceutical companies Eli Lilly and Boehringer have withdrawn from collaborations in the oncology sector in the past two years.

Experts see a major problem in Curevac’s previous focus on chemically unmodified mRNA. Because the use of this type of mRNA as a drug is associated with the challenge that it triggers comparatively strong defense reactions in the cells, which reduces the efficiency and increases the risk of side effects.

The competitors Moderna and Biontech, on the other hand, use modified mRNA in which one of the four nucleotide building blocks of the mRNA is slightly chemically modified. You can therefore use higher dosages with fewer side effects and ultimately achieve higher efficiencies.

A swing in this direction is now evident at Curevac. Curevac and its partner Glaxo-Smithkline want to bring a new Covid vaccine and also a flu vaccine based on unmodified mRNA into clinical tests, but also test versions with chemically modified mRNA over the course of the year.

After two decades of pioneering work in the field of mRNA, the company is at least partially moving away from its previous concept. This in turn should not only mean personnel changes, but also cost a lot of time and money.

Because the company has so far had less experience in the field of modified mRNA than its competitors. In addition, unlike Biontech and Moderna, it does not yet have licenses for the crucial basic patents from the University of Pennsylvania. There, in the 2000s, the scientists Drew Weissman and the researcher Katalin Karikó, who now holds a senior position at Biontech, developed the technology of modified mRNA.

More: Curevac falls further behind Biontech and Moderna in vaccine development