Shares of CureVac were up about 40% Monday after its CEO Franz-Werner Haas said in an interview with the German financial news site Boerse Online over the weekend that he was hopeful its vaccine will be approved by regulators early next year. Haas added that an “accelerated approval was possible” as well.
CureVac recently received approval from the governments of Germany and Belgium to start clinical trials for one of its vaccines for Covid-19.
CureVac is also backed by billionaire Dietmar Hopp, the co-founder of German software giant SAP (SAP).
Hopp owns nearly half of CureVac. The German government and Big Pharma leader GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)also have big stakes in the company. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invested $40 million in CureVac in 2015.
CureVac has a development and intellectual property agreement with Tesla since November 2015, according to regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Musk tweeted last month that Tesla’s German Grohmann division is helping build molecule printers for CureVac — a “side project” that Tesla may expand to include other drug companies.