Fresh off raising $640 million in private financing earlier this summer, Germany's Curevac BV burst onto the public market Friday with a $213.3 million Nasdaq IPO. Priced at a top-of-range $16 per share (NADAQ:CVAC), the company's stock rose more than 249% to close at $55.90 Aug. 14, buoyed by enthusiasm for its mRNA vaccine program against SARS-CoV-2. Majority shareholder and longtime Curevac backer Dievini Hopp Biotech Holding GmbH & Co. KG invested €100 million (US$118.3 million) in the company through a concurrent private placement.

The U.S. government bought 100 million doses of mRNA-1273 from Moderna Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., with a new award worth up to $1.525 billion, a deal that drops the implied cost per dose below that of several other companies receiving funding through the government program.

Reports out of Russia that the country approved a COVID-19 vaccine came with more questions than answers, as some in the rest of the world fretted over the apparently paltry degree of testing. Though the product has not completed phase III trials – human research thus far has involved only two groups of volunteers of 38 people each – Russia President Vladimir Putin is said to have declared Gam-COVID-Vac adequately studied.

Universities in China’s Greater Bay Area have developed a recombinant receptor-binding domain (RBD) protein vaccine candidate that has shown promise against COVID-19, researchers said Monday.

Universities in China’s Greater Bay Area have developed a recombinant receptor-binding domain (RBD) protein vaccine candidate that has shown promise against COVID-19, researchers said Monday at a press conference in Hong Kong. The vaccine can induce neutralizing activity after seven days with one dose, but more animal studies are now underway to test its durability.

Six months to the day that the World Health Organization (WHO) declared it a public health emergency, the SARS-CoV-2 virus, with its hideous red spikes, continues to taunt the world, hopping from host to host and haunting humans, many of whom wonder the same thing: What’s next?

An editorial yesterday in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) marveled that “the world has now witnessed the compression of six years of work into six months,” and went on to ask the question that’s on everyone’s pandemic-wrenched mind: “Can the vaccine multiverse do it again, leading to a reality of a safe, efficacious COVID-19 vaccine for the most vulnerable in the next six [months]?”