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CureVac fails in pivotal Covid-19 vaccine trial with 47% efficacy
- vmurthy 5y agoJust jumping in to say that the successes of Pfizer/Moderna/AstraZeneca et al may have primed us to think that vaccines are usually successful but the reality is that these are the exceptions (happy ones!) [0] . I can't find the exact source but most clinical trials don't even move to Phase-3. So failures like CureVac - while sad news indeed - happen :( [0]https://www.centerwatch.com/articles/12702-new-mit-study-puts-clinical-research-success-rate-at-14-percent https://www.centerwatch.com/articles/12702-new-mit-study-put...
- vladimirralev 5y agoI wonder if it's possible that CureVac had to take some extra risks to be competitive this late in the race. With the Pfeizer/Moderna results already in, may be they aimed to deliver a lower dose vaccine with less side effects that would be more desirable, but that didn't pay off.
- itsdrewmiller 5y agoVaccines usually are successful (like 80% in phase 3 make it out?) - it’s cancer drugs that ruin the averages since they are very common and never work.
- throwntoday 5y agoThat's better than the flu shot most years. Why is the bar so high for covid?
- rich_sasha 5y agoInteresting, if I understand correctly this is an mRNA vaccine too, just doesn’t seem to work that well (though I continue to be amazed at how small the sample sizes are). What are some of the details that make two vaccines work so differently, even if they use the same underlying technology? Production quality, dosage, slight variation in the active ingredients..?
- Vecr 5y agoThe other two have lots of fancy things done to the mRNA itself, including pseudouridine substitutions, 3 and 5 prime untranslated regions, and a poly-a tail. The payload comes from the NIH, and is modified by them as well with proline insertions to stabilize the spike in the prefusion form. All current EUA vaccines in the US (BioNTech, Moderna, Jansen), plus NovaVax (code not delivered to the user in that case) use some form of the NIH payload, as far as I can tell. Edit: I forgot about the proprietary mRNA delivery systems as well, I don't really know much about those.
- rich_sasha 5y agoInteresting list, thanks! Do you know of any popular science description of these? I did biology at middle school and not since (but I continue to find the mechanics of low-level biology fascinating).
- vacooom 5y agoI found this being a very good explanation for the technically inclined: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...
- tobessebot 5y agoShould be a good start. https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/part-2-reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/part-2-reverse-engineering... https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source... https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/curevac-vaccine-and-wonders-of-biology/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/curevac-vaccine-and-wonder... https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/genetic-code-of-covid-19-vaccines/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/genetic-code-of-covid-19-v...
- spuz 5y agoThanks, these are really good reads.
- throwaway4good 5y agoMaybe they should include a baseline vaccine (say pfizer biontech) in their trails instead of just placebo and their own vaccine. That would show whether the result is due to new variants of the virus or just different efficacy of the new vaccine.
- throwaway4good 5y agoYou have broad vaccinations already in some parts of the world, presumably that means that the variants that are still spreading are the ones that are less susceptible to the vaccinations.
- throwaway4good 5y agoMaybe I am naive but what is wrong with this idea?
- spadez 5y agoI am not sure, may be it might show the Moderna vaccines are just as ineffective (against the variants circulating now). I am not sure anyone would want that, particularly things like these are cropping up https://austingwalters.com/covid19-vaccine-risks/ https://austingwalters.com/covid19-vaccine-risks/
- hannob 5y agoYou need huge trials to do this. The power of your trial comes from the "events", i.e. number of people who got symptoms of covid-19. Have 2 vaccinated groups? Not many events.
- throwaway4good 5y agoYou need 50% more subjects goes my calculation.
- peytn 5y agoIn practice these big trials are run as sloppily as possible to get the desired result. There’s a whole cottage industry of consultants. Think unclear instructions leading to dosing mixups and such. The type of trial you’re proposing is notorious for sloppiness.
- dharma1 5y agoI wonder if CureVac can come back from this, or are they toast?
- rurban 5y agoMy bet is on toast, technically. Gov. money (i.e. taxpayers money) will still keep them afloat though, because they love to keep a 2nd local option.
- throwaway4good 5y agoI think they raised a lot of money an IPO last year.
- kleiba 5y agoThey received ~252.000.000 Euros from the German government alone in September 2020 [1], and previously another ~560.000.000 Euros from "private" investors in July 2020 (which somehow included another ~300.000.000 Euros from the German government as well)[2]. I'm sure the German tax payers are delighted. -- [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-germany-vaccine/germany-grants-biontech-curevac-745-million-to-speed-up-covid-19-vaccine-work-idUSKBN2661JB https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-german... [2] https://www.curevac.com/en/2020/07/21/curevac-raises-a-total-of-usd-640-million-in-private-financing-round/ https://www.curevac.com/en/2020/07/21/curevac-raises-a-total...
- pedrocr 5y agoIf we didn't have the other vaccines, getting 47% efficiency for a billion euros would have been an awesome result. We could have also stopped the pandemic with a 47% effective vaccine. We're just spoiled because the vaccine development efforts did so well in general that 90%+ is now our standard.
- throwaway4good 5y agoThey were the most promising vaccine company at one point. So promising that Trump tried to buy them.
- tchalla 5y ago> The disappointing efficacy of the shot known as CVnCoV emerged from an interim analysis based on 134 COVID-19 cases in the study with about 40,000 volunteers in Europe and Latin America. The number of people who had Covid-19 cases seem surprisingly low and there were at least 13 variants amongst 124 cases. The real challenge though lies in the interpretation : is the efficacy due to variants or due to vaccine's inability? https://www.curevac.com/en/2021/06/16/curevac-provides-update-on-phase-2b-3-trial-of-first-generation-covid-19-vaccine-candidate-cvncov/ https://www.curevac.com/en/2021/06/16/curevac-provides-updat...
- rurban 5y agoThis question is answered in the press release. The new variants don't explain this low number alone. The manufacturer tried to explain that away, that 41% is still extremely good, compared to other vaccines. Nobody followed him there
- akiselev 5y agoDoesn't matter as much, now that there are other vaccines on the market. Any new vaccine candidates will be compared against the existing ones as a golden standard and any candidate that doesn't improve on the existing options significantly along some dimension is not likely to get approved. The desperate scramble to reopen the world led to record development and approval times BY A FREAKING MILE. HN discourages caps but it's hard to overstate just how unprecedented these approvals were. The top 10 list of fastest drug approvals is just a list of chemotherapy drugs and the median time for novel vaccine discovery lies somewhere between decades and centuries. Now that the world is returning to normal, the standards for premarketing approval are too.
- tinus_hn 5y agoIt matters a lot because for the ‘gold standard’ existing ones the scare story is they aren’t effective against the variants either.
- tchalla 5y ago> Any new vaccine candidates will be compared against the existing ones as a golden standard But, this clinical trial didn't compare to existing ones.
- sunkenvicar 5y agoIvermectin is far more effective. Argentina found 100% effectiveness when used prophylactically.
- phreeza 5y agoA glance at what could have been, showing us how lucky we really got with >3 working vaccines deployed within a year.