Jab ‘can be adapted to fight the new strain in six weeks’
THE first Covid-19 vaccine could be adapted within six weeks if it is ineffective against the new variant, according to its developers.
Ugur Sahin, chief executive of German firm BioNTech, said his firm had ‘scientific confidence’ the jab will work against the new strain emerging in Britain.
But if it doesn’t, a new vaccine to tackle it could be rapidly available using the same genetic code called messenger RNA (mRNA).
Mr Sahin said: ‘In principle, the beauty of the mRNA technology is 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.’
His comments echo those of Professor Wendy Barclay, a Government adviser on coronavirus and head of infectious disease at Imperial College London. At a
briefing this week, asked if updating vaccines to react to the new strain would be a ‘massive headache’, she said: ‘Probably less so in the long-term than it is for flu.
‘If we end up going for a new era of vaccines with messenger RNA, updating an mRNA vaccine is a lot easier than updating the flu vaccine.’
However she said this would require a ‘worldwide effort’ to coordinate the new jabs.
Regulators may need to approve changes to vaccines before the shots can be used. Experts believe the new variant of coronavirus sweeping the country is unlikely to escape the vaccines designed to deal with previous strains, or to leave immunised people without the correct immune response to fight it. But this has not yet been confirmed, following the vaccination of half a million high-risk people in the UK.
First identified in the UK in late September, the mutation has spread rapidly and has now been documented in Denmark, Iceland, the Netherlands, Australia and Italy. Pfizer, which manufactures the BioNtech vaccine – so far the only one approved for use and rolled out in this country – is looking at how well its jab works on the new variant.
US biotech company Moderna is also testing its vaccine, which has been approved for use in the US but not yet in the UK.
Pfizer said it was ‘generating data’ on how well blood samples from people immunised with its vaccine ‘may be able to neutralise the new strain from the UK’.
Moderna, which has a deal with the UK to supply 7 million vaccines, said: ‘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; we will be performing additional tests in the coming weeks to confirm this expectation.’
Mr Sahin said the proteins on the strain were 99 per cent similar to previous strains, and therefore BioNTech had ‘scientific confidence’ that its vaccine will be effective. He added: ‘But we will know it only if the experiment is done and we will need about two weeks from now to get the data. The likelihood that our vaccine works... is relatively high.’
Pfizer said: ‘One of the reasons Pfizer and BioNTech chose to utilise a mRNA platform is because of the potential for the flexibility of the technology in comparison to traditional vaccine technologies.
‘This flexibility includes the ability to alter the RNA sequence in the vaccine to cover new strains of the virus, if one ever were to emerge that is not well covered by the current vaccine.’