The co-founder of BioNTech has claimed that its vaccine works against the mutated strain which has been recently detected in Britain. Furthermore, the company can also make the mutation-beating vaccine in six weeks.
“Scientifically, it is highly likely that the immune response by this vaccine also can deal with the new virus variant,” said Ugur Sahin on Tuesday.
“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 sounded optimistic.
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 because it “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”.
“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.
