Today, BioNTech Co-founder and CEO Ugur Sahin said it is “highly likely” that their vaccine against the COVID-19 virus will work against the mutated strain detected in Britain, but 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,” Ugur Sahin said.
“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,” the CEO added.
According to Mr Sahin, the new variant detected in Britain has nine mutations.
The BioNtech Co-founder shows support to partner Pfizer by stating 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.
Countries across the globe shut their borders to Britain on Monday due to fears of the highly infectious new COVID-19 strain, causing travel chaos and raising the prospect of food shortages in the United Kingdom.
Ugur Sahin said tests are being run on the variant and results are expected in two weeks. Mr Sahin expressed that it was more important that his employees get the vaccine so they can continue to do their jobs.
