Valneva will not have been able to take full advantage of covid-19. The Franco-Austrian laboratory announced this Thursday that it was going to part with 20 to 25% of its workforce, after the failure of its vaccine program, the only “inactivated” type, compared to the behemoths Pfizer or Moderna, all of them linked to messenger RNA.
Valneva continues to claim a higher workforce “around 25% than before the COVID-19 crisis”, after this reorganization, while 700 people currently work there.
R&D spending will also fall from a range of between 120 to 135 million euros, to an amount of 95 to 110 million, due to the “decrease in activities” linked to covid-19. In July, the European Commission reduced its order to 1.25 million and forced production to stop.
A month later, Valneva felt that she did not want to continue her development without another big order during the third quarter: it did not arrive. He now has to position himself for withdrawals and wait for back order compensation from the Commission and the UK.
Chikungunya and Japanese encephalitis
Although its vaccine stocks are still in its hands and have depreciated by almost 100 million euros, during the first nine months of the year, the laboratory nevertheless recorded a comfortable turnover of 249.9 million euros, compared to 69.8 million from 2021. A significant increase made possible by higher sales and losses, especially much lower in research.
In its post-covid strategy, Valneva is betting on several files, starting with Japanese encephalitis, its other available and marketed vaccine. And it is currently submitting an application to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the marketing of a version against chikungunya, a file that should be completed by the end of the year.
Among his other priorities, the recruitment for the last phase of testing a vaccine against Lyme disease – at the center of the interest of Pfizer, which took over 8% of the capital of the laboratory in the summer – or the development of research against the metapneumovirus, which affects children with bronchiolitis, or the Epstein-Barr virus, responsible for mononucleosis and multiple sclerosis.
Source: BFM TV
