Co-founder of BioNTech Ugur Sahin claimed said that the immune response of the coronavirus vaccine produced by his company can also resist a new strain of the mutated virus, which has been recently found in the United Kingdom. A new mutation-beating vaccine can be adjusted in 6 weeks.
This was reported by the publication NDTV.
"Scientifically, it is highly likely that the immune response by this vaccine also can deal with the new virus variant," Ugur Sahin said. But if needed, "in principle the beauty of the messenger technology is that we can directly start to engineer a vaccine that completely mimics this new mutation -- we could be able to provide a new vaccine technically within six weeks."
According to Sahin, 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".
As was reported earlier by ‘Apostrophe’, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), the new COVID-19 strain has been already found not only in the U.K. but also in Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Ukraine, and even in Australia and South Africa.