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BERLIN: The CEO of BioNTech says the German pharmaceutical company is confident that its coronavirus vaccine will work against the UK variant, but more studies are needed to be completely sure.
Ugur Sahin said on Tuesday (December 22) that “we do not know at this time whether our vaccine is also capable of providing protection against this new variant,” but because the proteins in the variant are 99 percent the same as the predominant strains , BioNTech has “scientific confidence” in the vaccine.
Sahin said BioNTech is conducting further studies and hopes to be certain in the coming weeks.
“The probability that our vaccine will work … is relatively high,” he said.
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If necessary, BioNTech could tailor its vaccine in six weeks, Sahin said, since the vaccine is based on messenger RNA technology.
“In principle, the beauty of messaging technology is that we can go straight to designing a vaccine that completely mimics this new mutation; we might be able to technically provide a new vaccine in six weeks,” he said.
Sahin added that the variant detected in Britain has nine mutations, instead of just one, as is often common.
BioNTech’s vaccine, developed in conjunction with the US pharmaceutical company Pfizer, is licensed for use in more than 45 countries, including Singapore, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
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