Pfizer VP: Vaccine can be adapted to fight COVID variants

As new strains of the virus that cause COVID-19 are circulating around the U.S., a Pfizer executive said Saturday that the company’s vaccine could be quickly adapted to fight the new strains.

Morten Sogaard, vice president of Target Sciences, Emerging Science & Innovation, noted the company’s mRNA vaccine has an advantage because Pfizer can “alter the sequence of the RNA very easily.”

“You can basically within a couple of weeks put a new sequence in,” he said, allowing the vaccine maker to respond to new strains “much more efficiently.”

Sogaard, who lived in Ridgefield for more than a decade with his family, was the keynote speaker at a virtual conference hosted by Western Connecticut State University Saturday. Sogaard discussed how researchers at Pfizer have begun harnessing artificial intelligence to speed the development of new drugs.

He gave an example of developing a vaccine against the flu. While researchers might decide to pursue one vaccine to combat a particular strain ahead of flu season, by the time the vaccine is ready “many months later,” the strain may have gone in a different direction, resulting in a vaccine that’s less effective.

The shorter timeframe needed to create an mRNA vaccine helps prevent that. He also described the development of the company’s mRNA vaccine in less than a year as “unparalleled.”

Sogaard said other researchers are also watching other mutations of the virus around the world to see if they can model the sequence for “the next vaccine.”

That comes as the pharmaceutical company’s CEO, Albert Bourla, said people could need a third dose booster shot of the vaccine within 12 months of getting their second shot.

“A likely scenario is that there will be likely a need for a third dose, somewhere between six and 12 months and then from there, there will be an annual re-vaccination, but all of that needs to be confirmed. And again, the variants will play a key role,” Bourla said during an interview on CNBC that aired Thursday but was taped on April 1.

The news people might need an annual dose of a COVID-19 vaccine didn’t come as a surprise to Gov. Ned Lamont Thursday.

“I don’t think I’m shocked,” said Lamont during his pandemic briefing. “We’ve been having annual flu shots since I was a kid.”

As of Thursday, some 55 percent of Connecticut residents over the age of 16 have received at least one shot of vaccine. And in some smaller communities, vaccine coverage is approaching or has surpassed 70 percent, according to town-by-town data released by the state that same day.

But that also comes as new variants of the virus that causes COVID-19 are circulating in the state. The most recent report on variants from the Yale School of Public Health and Jackson Laboratory showed about 85 percent of samples researchers identified through genomic sequencing in the past week were identified as variants of concern or variants of interest.

Lamont said the state has been in contact with the makers of the three vaccines granted emergency use authorization in the United States about the potential for creating a custom “booster shot” for new variants of the virus.

“I think it may be something that’s with us for a while, but it’s still a wait and see,” Lamont said.

Sogaard said Pfizer is also shifting how it approaches manufacturing. In the past, researchers would develop what Sogaard called a “pilot” manufacturing lab before moving to a large manufacturing facility. Now manufacturing has shifted to smaller but more continuous production,

The company has also developed “self-contained pods” for manufacturing. “You actually ship your manufacturing container say to Saudi Arabia or to China and then you just have to have electricity and water,” he said.

AI also played a role in allowing Pfizer to “scale-up” manufacturing of the vaccine quickly, Sogaard said.

“AI’s certainly here to stay, I think it’s just going to get more and more important,” he said.