Foreign Property News | Posted by Shwe Zin Win
German pharmaceutical company BioNTech is confident that its coronavirus vaccine will work against the mutated strain detected in Britain.
"Scientifically, it is highly likely that the immune response by this vaccine also can deal with the new virus variant," said Ugur Sahin, the co-founder of BioNTech. However, "We don’t know at the moment if our vaccine is also able to provide protection against this new variant," he added.
Sahin said that the proteins on the UK variant are 99% the same as on the prevailing strains, and therefore BioNTech has “scientific confidence" that its vaccine will be effective.
“But we will know it only if the experiment is done and we will need about two weeks from now to get the data," he said. “The likelihood that our vaccine works ... is relatively high."
He also stated that if needed, the pharma company could also provide a vaccine to combat the new strain of coronavirus in six weeks.
"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 mentioned, according to news agency AFP.
A new SARS-CoV-2 variant was found in the United Kingdom last week. “Over the last few days, thanks to our world-class genomic capability, we have identified a new variant of the coronavirus, which may be associated with the faster spread in the South of England," UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock told the House of commons on 14 December.
Public Health England (PHE) announced that 1,108 cases with this variant have been identified as of 13 December. Outside Britain, nine cases of the new strain have been reported in Denmark, as well as one case in the Netherlands and another in Australia, according to the WHO.
BioNTech joined hands with US drugmaker Pfizer to develop a vaccine against novel coronavirus. Their experimental vaccine has been authorized for use in more than 45 countries including Britain, the United States and the European Union.
Moderna is also testing its coronavirus vaccine to see if it works against the new mutated version of the virus, CNN reported. "Based on the data to date, we expect that the Moderna vaccine-induced immunity would be protective against the variants recently described in the UK," Moderna said in a statement adding, "We will be performing additional tests in the coming weeks to confirm this expectation."
Ref: livemint
