BioNTech's co-founder Ugur Sahin on Tuesday said it was "highly likely" that its vaccine against the novel coronavirus works against the newly formed mutated strain detected in the United Kingdom. He added that it could also adapt the vaccine 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," he said.
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."
According to Sahin, the COVID variant found in UK has nine mutations, rather than just one as is usually common.
Sahin nevertheless is confident that the vaccine developed by Pfizer would be efficient as it contains more than 1000 amino acids, and only nine of them have changed, so that means 99 % of the protein is still the same.
Furthermore, he said that tests are currently being run on the variant. The result for the same is expected in two weeks.
