Aeterna Zentaris discontinues vaccine development pipeline

Orally active, live-attenuated bacterial vaccine platform with potential application against coronavirus, including COVID-19 and Chlamydia: The Company worked on evaluating administration routes, dosing and immunization scheme, and conducted in-vivo immunology experiments with candidate strains expressing various antigens in relevant mice models. To date, the Company has not been able to select a clinical development candidate for a COVID-19 vaccine. Also, COVID-19 vaccine landscape has continued to evolve profoundly in the past two years. There are highly effective vaccines available, an increasing number of therapeutic options are meanwhile approved or in later stage development and less lethal virus variants are spreading, all of which increase the financial risk associated with any early stage COVID-19 vaccine program. In order to ensure we are prudent with the use of resources, given the early stage of the Company’s vaccine development programs and the changes in the global situation, Aeterna has decided that it will not pursue further development of the vaccine platform for either COVID-19 or Chlamydia, As a result, the Company has also elected to terminate its existing license agreements with the University of Wuerzburg for that vaccine platform technology.