Cobra's share value fell substantially last Friday following the announcement that GSK Biologicals had ended a manufacturing contract to produce two HIV vaccine candidates half way through.
However, according to Cobra, this is a common occurence in the industry and in no way represents a particularly high loss for the contract manufacturer.
"This deal with GSK is one of many contracts we have with biopharma companies.
We were obliged to announce it, but just because it's GSK doesn't mean that it was more significant than any other contracts we currently have," Peter Coleman, Cobra's finance director, told Biopharma-Reporter.com.
"We experience this kind of situation often with our customers, it is a difficult business to forecast, and it is routine for biopharma companies to hold or stop a project before its completion."
Cobra stressed that the drug giant's decision was "unrelated to the capabilities or the work undertaken by Cobra" as all of Cobra's commitments in this respect have been successfully achieved - the CMO has completed over 50 per cent of the tasks specified under the deal.
It is understood that GSK's decision to terminate the agreement followed an internal project review, but the company was unavailable for comment.
The deal was originally signed last May between Cobra, GSK and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) and the work was being performed at Cobra's Oxford and Keele facilities.
"While the deal did not have a specific time frame, it was expected that the bulk of the manufacturing process would be completed in November or December this year," said Coleman.
The contract was in support of a previously announced collaboration between IAVI and GSK to advance the development of a technology licensed to GSK, which uses non-infectious vaccine vectors to stimulate specific immune responses directed against HIV.
The adenovirus vectors, originally isolated from non-human primates, are engineered to be non-infectious and are capable of efficiently delivering genes expressing HIV proteins to the immune system.
It is unclear whether the IAVI-GSK collaborative research, which focuses on vaccines designed to elicit immune responses against variants of HIV that circulate predominantly in Africa, will still continue or if the project will be dropped altogether.