Desperate times can make for unusual measures. Midnight discussions last week between very senior European Commission leaders and bankers at the European Investment Bank signed off on an €80m ($90m) loan to CureVac, a 20-year-old spinout of University of Tübingen in Germany, to help the drugs company quickly scale up the production of its candidate Covid-19 vaccine.
Partnerships are vital to developing and manufacturing vaccines. But, in this global solidarity to find a cure to the coronavirus or its related Covid-19 disease, realpolitik crept in.
One insider to the agreement said American government attempts to acquire CureVac’s Covid-19 vaccine for exclusive use in the US sped along the loan so production would be available to all. The insider said: “Geopolitics meant Europe had to step in and keep CureVac. This meant saying yes then finding a way of it happening.”
Dietmar Hopp, CureVac’s main investor through his Dievini Hopp family office set up after he moved on from founding software company SAP, said he wanted CureVac to develop a coronavirus vaccine to “help people not just regionally but in solidarity across the world” and would avoid selling out to the US.
Hopp has been part of a consortium of public, family, corporate and VC investors supporting CureVac over the past 20 years with between €300m and €500m in funding, with Eli Lilly’s partnership providing providing a €1.8bn in milestone payments.
Both public-private partnerships as well as partnerships between the traditional pharmaceutical giants and smaller biotech players can be critical to getting these vaccines from trial to market.
As well as CureVac, other biotechs firms BioNTech – a spinout of Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz – and Moderna – a spinout of Harvard University – are specialising in messenger RNA (mRNA) therapeutics are targeting Covid-19.
Germany-based BioNTech recently announced two strategic partnerships, with Fosun Pharma to advance efforts in China and Pfizer to do the same outside China, to advance development of a vaccine. Pfizer alone provided $120m in upfront, equity and near-term research payments to develop mRNA-based vaccines for prevention of influenza, while BioNTech raised $270m in its series A financing in December 2017 and $180m in seed funding in December 2008.
US-based Moderna, meanwhile, is working with America’s National Institutes of Health (NIH). It kicked off its first trial Monday in Seattle, Washington, while BioNTech hopes to starts accelerated trials in the summer.
Moderna made history in December 2018 when it floated in the then-largest biotech initial public offering.
Other companies, including Johnson & Johnson and INOVIO Pharmaceuticals, working on other coronavirus-vaccine approaches are interesting for other reasons with one of the most impressive stories coming from Japan-based Fujifilm.
Fujifilm is developing and commercializing a range of drugs having acquired manufacturing and marketing approval in Japan for Avigan (favipiravir), when it acquired majority then complete control of Toyama Chemical between 2008 and 2018.
Favipiravir was discovered by phenotypic screening against influenza virus at the research laboratories of Toyama Chemical in the mid-2000s just as Fujifilm was trying to diversify away from cameras and into beauty, healthcare and other industries.
As the Nikkei Financial Review said, when Fujifilm was considering the Toyama Chemical acquisition, its director, Yuzo Toda, looked at how Avigan could block viruses from proliferating as well as how Toyama was commercializing about 43% of the drugs it tested, or more than triple the industry average. Together, the partnership has become more powerful.
China’s government has confirmed Avigan’s effectiveness against Covid-19’s symptoms but there are probably other options available with Future Planet Capital, our partners for the GCV Symposium in June, looking to score them and feed them in to the MIT Covid-19 analytics programme for further evaluation while Eze Vidra has 100+ startups offering free products or services in response to Coronavirus. Brian Hollins, Goldman Sachs alumnus and GCV Rising Stars award winner, has a series of VC interviews on perspectives of Covid-19 (Password: Perspectives), while my colleague, Rob Lavine, is preparing some for CVCs.
The world is a better place indeed when it works together.
