BioNTech co-founder on Tuesday said it’s possible that its vaccine against the novel coronavirus can work on the new mutated covid strain that has been detected in Britain, but if necessary it can also modify the vaccine in six weeks.
Ugur Sahin said, "Scientifically, it is highly likely that the immune response by this vaccine also can deal with the new virus variant.” But if needed, “in principle the beauty of the messenger technology is that we can directly start to engineer a vaccine which completely mimics this new mutation -- we could be able to provide a new vaccine technically within six weeks."
BioNTech co-founder Ugur Sahin said the new virus variant detected in Britain has nine mutations, rather than just one which is usually common.
Although, he assured that the vaccine manufactured with Pfizer would be effective for the new strain because the Pfizer vaccine comprises more than 1,000 amino acids “only nine of them have changed, so that means 99 per cent of the protein is still the same".
Sahin said experiments are being conducted on the variant and results expected in two weeks. "We have scientific confidence that the vaccine might protect but we will only know it if the experiment is done. we will publish the data as soon as possible," he added.
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The new coronavirus variant was detected in the United Kingdom last week which is spreading faster and is ‘out of control’ said UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock. Many countries have banned incoming flights from the UK while Australia, Italy and South Africa have already detected patents with the new strain.
BioNTech together with US drugmaker Pfizer has developed an anti-coronavirus vaccine which has been given nod for emergency use authorization in more than 45 countries including Britain, the United States, Saudi Arabia and the European Union.