FRANKFURT (Reuters) – CureVac and GSK’s second-generation mRNA vaccine candidate targeting two recent COVID-19 variants has been shown to be highly effective in preclinical studies on rodents, CureVac said.
A study in mice showed that the bivalent vaccine candidate, designed to address the Beta and Delta variants of the virus, elicited neutralizing antibody levels that were comparable to the monovalent vaccine candidates targeting only one of the variants.
“During exposure of the vaccinated animals to either the Beta or the Delta variant, the bivalent mRNA vaccine significantly reduced the viral load in the animals,” CureVac said in a statement on Thursday.
(Reporting by Ludwig Burger, editing by Kirsti Knolle)