By Andrew Silver
SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China’s COVID-19 vaccine developer Stemirna Therapeutics has fallen behind on regular wage payments to its staff, according to three former employees, as the firm grapples with tight funding.
Stemirna CEO Li Hangwen told news outlet Caixin in October that the company was in a “difficult” financial position as it struggles to raise fresh financing and its COVID vaccine has yet to receive marketing approval from Chinese regulators.
Two of the former employees said they had stopped receiving payments from August, and the company advised them the delay was because it was waiting on additional investor funds.
The three former employees all requested anonymity, citing factors including confidentiality agreements, and said they left the company because of the overdue payments.
Stemirna and Li did not respond to requests for comment.
Stemirna was among a handful of domestic firms in China racing to develop vaccines using messenger RNA (mRNA) technology after the country throughout the pandemic declined to use mRNA vaccines from abroad.
But demand for COVID-19 vaccines in the country has plummeted after China lifted its COVID curbs abruptly in December last year, prompting a wave of infections.
Stemirna said in July it was suspending work at a factory it had planned to use to manufacture its COVID-19 mRNA vaccine candidate, citing a lack of demand.
The company had planned to have the capacity to produce 400 million doses of its vaccine candidate a year via two factories, the second of which had not started operations.
(Reporting by Andrew Silver; Editing by Miyoung Kim and Christian Schmollinger)
