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SEDAN: The BioNTech co-founder said today that his coronavirus vaccine is “very likely” to work against the mutated strain detected in Britain, but could also adapt the vaccine if necessary within six weeks.
“Scientifically, it is very likely that the immune response of this vaccine can also cope with the new variant of the virus,” said Ugur Sahin.
But if necessary, “in principle, the beauty of messaging technology is that we can start straight away designing a vaccine that completely mimics this new mutation; we might be able to technically provide a new vaccine in six weeks.”
Sahin said the variant detected in Britain has nine mutations, rather than just one, as is often common.
However, he expressed his 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, which means that 99 percent of the protein remains the same.”
He said tests are underway on the variant and results are expected in two weeks.
“We have scientific confidence that the vaccine could protect, but we will only know if the experiment is done … we will publish the data as soon as possible,” he added. – AFP
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