After its Nasdaq debut on Friday, CureVac ‘s shares soared as high as 222 per cent. And today the stock price is poised to see yet another major jump.
CureVac is a German phase 1 biotech company that develops cancer treatments and vaccines based on mRNA. The company originally planned to raise $200 million by offering a price range of $14 to $16 for 13.3 million shares. And the firm was aiming to lend $118 million to Dietmar Hopp in a concomitant private placement.
The stock price of CureVac opened at $44 per share during its Nasdaq debut and on Friday, the price ended up closing at $55.90. The price of the IPO had been $16 per share.
The CureVac pipeline includes lead candidates CV8102 (currently in a solid tumor phase 1 trial) and CV7202 (currently in a Phase 1 trial for future rabies vaccination). And CureVac is also developing a coronavirus mRNA vaccine system (SARS-CoV-2) — which it launched in a Phase 1 trial in healthy volunteers in June 2020 with the anticipated results Q4 2020.
CureVac CEO Franz-Werner Haas said the firm now has around one billion euros in cash on hand to grow its vaccine candidate and increase manufacturing capacity to meet global demand. And CureVac is currently in talks to establish purchase agreements with governments around the world.
The German government bought a $343 million 23 per cent stake in CureVac back in June. And GlaxoSmithKline and the Qatar Investment Authority also acquired a stake in CureVac about a month later. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation also made a $40 million investment in CureVac in 2015.
CureVac has had a development and intellectual property contract with Tesla according to CNN since November 2015. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, wrote in a tweet last month that the German Grohmann division of the automaker is helping to create molecule printers for CureVac — a side project the company is working on and that might benefit other drug firms.
The business reached sales of € 17.4 million (around $20.6 million) in 2019. This was a 35 per cent improvement from the previous year. The company is still unprofitable.
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