What happened
Shares of CureVac (CVAC 0.87%) were up by 14.3% for the week as of Friday morning, after having been up by as much as 16%, according to data provided by S&P Global Market Intelligence. The clinical-stage biotech company's stock closed last week at $10.24, then rose to as high as $12.09 on Tuesday. The healthcare stock is up more than 95% this year.
So what
CureVac focuses on tumor immunotherapy, using messenger RNA (mRNA) therapies. The German company said on Tuesday that it had dosed its first patient in a phase 1 trial for its investigational cancer vaccine, CVGBM. CureVac said it expects to publish early trial data in the second half of next year. The study will look at the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine on patients with glioblastoma and astrocytoma, two cancers that begin in the brain or spinal cord. The patients will have already undergone surgical resection and radiation.
In 2020, CureVac began a partnership with GSK (formerly known as GlaxoSmithKline), to develop new vaccines to treat cancer and other diseases based on CureVac's second-generation mRNA platform. CVGBM is the first investigational cancer vaccine to come out of that effort.
Now what
CureVac has a long way to go before it has a commercial product and before it is profitable. In that sense, there's plenty of risk in the stock, though it has solid long-term potential, especially because of its collaboration with GSK. It also has a pipeline with 16 programs, though all are in early stages of development. The company reported only 7.1 million euros (about $7.78 million) in collaboration revenue in the first quarter and a loss of 60.4 million euros (around $66.2 million). It said it had 617.5 million euros (around $676.4 million) in cash, enough to fund operations into 2025.
