Berlin: The co-founder of BioNTech said Tuesday it was ‘highly likely’ that its vaccine against the coronavirus works against the mutated strain detected in Britain. Ugur Sahin said that BioNTech could adapt the coronavirus vaccine to fight the mutated strain, if necessary in six weeks. “Scientifically, it is highly likely that the immune response by this vaccine also can deal with the new virus variant,” said Sahin said Tuesday.
“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,” he added.
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Sahin said the variant detected in Britain has nine mutations, rather than just one as is usually common. Nevertheless, he voiced confidence that the vaccine developed with Pfizer would be efficient. “This is because the vaccine contains more than 1,000 amino acids, and only nine of them have changed, so that means 99 percent of the protein is still the same,” said Sahin.
He said tests are being run on the variant, with 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,” added Sahin. He has also asserted that there is no need to panic at the moment.
The new strain detected in Britain has created panic across the world. More than 30 countries have banned flights from the United Kingdom (UK). Among them is India which has suspended all UK flights till December 31.
