French Pharma Bets on Old School Approach for Covid Vaccine

(Bloomberg) -- A French pharmaceutical company betting on a more traditional approach to producing a Covid-19 shot believes it has more than a 50% chance of success, according to its chief executive officer, with a billion-pound U.K. deal on the line.

Valneva SE, a vaccine specialist created by a merger in 2013, is the only drugmaker in the U.S. and Europe developing an inactivated shot against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The approach uses a sample of the coronavirus that has been killed to stimulate an immune response without causing the disease. The approach has been used for decades with inoculations for polio and hepatitis A.

The company believes that the well-established safety profile of inactivated jabs will allow a successful shot to be used in a broader group of people than newer technologies being tested by other drugmakers.

“We are backing a real, well-proven technology,” Thomas Lingelbach, president and CEO of Valneva, said in an interview Tuesday.

Valneva signed a deal worth as much as 1.4 billion pounds ($1.8 billion) with the U.K. this month to supply as many as 190 million doses of its shot between 2021 and 2025. The British government is also investing in the biotech’s Scottish manufacturing plant, where the vaccine -- due to start human trials in December -- will be created.

The French company plans to have the vaccine available for use in the second half of next year on a two-dose regimen plus booster a year later, in line with other inactivated vaccines.

Possible Orders

Valneva is also in discussions with the European Commission, Canada and Australia about possible orders. There have been no talks with the U.S., which is the only country not looking at an inactivated vaccine candidate, Lingelbach said.

Valneva is using the same technology applied to its Japanese Encephalitis vaccine, the only shot that exists against the disease. A number of Chinese drugmakers, including Beijing-based Sinovac Biotech Ltd., are also working on inactivated Covid-19 vaccines.

Lingelbach said any profit from the company’s SARS-CoV-2 shot would probably be marginal, but the focus on vaccines and accelerated development timelines as a result of the pandemic could benefit the company longer term. Valneva plans a U.S. listing on Nasdaq in mid-2021.

“I’m not expecting that it’s going to revolutionize vaccine development,” Lingelbach said. “But I am expecting that there will be collective lessons learned, and hopefully it will reduce development times for new vaccines” in the future.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.