Ugur Sahin, co-founder of German biotech company BioNTech, said today that his company’s vaccine is “very likely” to protect against the variant of the virus found in the United Kingdom, but could also be modified within six weeks if necessary.
Ugur Sahin said, “Scientifically, it is very likely that the immune response triggered by this vaccine could also protect against this new variant of the virus.”
But if the need arises, “the advantage of the messenger technology in principle is that we can just start modifying the vaccine that can fully mimic this new mutation. Strictly speaking, we can deliver the new vaccine within six weeks.” Shaheen added that the variant of the virus found in the UK has nine mutations.
However, he remains confident in the efficacy of the vaccine developed with Pfizer because the virus “contains more than 1,000 amino acids and only nine of them have sequence changes, so that means 99 percent of the protein remains intact.
Shaheen said that trials have been conducted on the mutated virus, and the results are expected to be available within 2 weeks.
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