One hard lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic? A green light doesn’t necessarily spell success.
Take Medicago. A little less than a year after its first approval in Canada, the plant-based vaccine maker is shutting out the lights. And with it, Canada’s homegrown COVID shot Covifenz is being sent to the compost heap.
Late this week, Medicago’s last remaining shareholder, Mitsubishi Chemical Group, said it would “cease all its operations” at Medicago proper, as well as the biotech’s R&D branch and its U.S. division. Additionally, Mitsubishi has elected to stop sales of Medicago’s recombinant coronavirus shot Covifenz, the company said in a separate release (French).
Mitsubishi Chemical further explained it won’t make additional investments in Medicago, with plans to chart an “orderly wind-up of its business and operations in Canada and the United States.”
Despite the biotech’s success in the clinic, the commercial pressure seems to have proved too much for Medicago.
Since the approval of Covifenz in Canada last February, the company has been “preparing to transition to commercial production.”
That said, “significant changes” on the COVID-19 vaccine front have made things difficult for Medicago, Mitsubishi Chemical said.
And following a “comprehensive analysis of the current global demand” for COVID shots, plus an assessment of the “economic context” for the vaccines and the “challenges Medicago faces in its transition to commercial production,” Mitsubishi has decided to call it a day.
Medicago has been feeling the heat for some time. In November, the company eliminated 62 jobs at its manufacturing site in Durham, North Carolina. The move followed a “careful assessment of Medicago’s current and future needs,” the company’s then-new CEO Toshifumi Tada said in an email at the time.
“[A]s the pandemic has evolved, the epidemiological situation and the availability of bivalent vaccines has demonstrated the need for Medicago to review its initial plan and its global strategy regarding Covifenz,” he added.
Tada also pointed out in November that Medicago was continuing to “work on a new approach to developing and manufacturing plant-based vaccines and therapeutics.”
In a phase 3 trial conducted in more than 24,000 adults across six countries, Covifenz mustered a respectable 71% efficacy against COVID-19 by various SARS-CoV-2 variants, though not Omicron, which wasn’t present at the time of the study. The shot uses a plant-based virus-like particles technology to mimic the coronavirus spike protein, which is combined with GSK’s pandemic adjuvant.
As for what Medicago's shuttering means for GSK, the British pharma said that there was "no impact on GSK’s ongoing R&D programmes or commercial activity as a result of this announcement."
"GSK is not a shareholder in Medicago and has no additional ongoing supply commitments," a company spokesperson explained over email.
Uniquely, Medicago’s vaccines were born not in a factory, but a greenhouse, where the company used the leaves of Nicotiana benthamiana—a close relative of the tobacco plant—as bioreactors to create the shot’s antigen.
Medicago had been producing its COVID shot from its U.S. facility in North Carolina, which the company built as part of a 2010 partnership with the U.S. government to prove the scalability of its plant-based vaccine platform.
Medicago had also been building a large manufacturing complex in Quebec City, where work was expected to wrap up around 2024. Medicago had originally planned to employ 500 workers there.
Editor's note: This story was updated with a comment from GSK.