Hope for UK’s ‘out of control’ mutant COVID-19: BioNTech co-founder says can make vaccine to beat it in 6 wks

Ugur Sahin, co-founder of BioNTech said on Tuesday that it was "highly likely" that its vaccine against Covid-19 works against the mutated strain detected in Britain, but it could also adapt the vaccine if necessary in six weeks.

The variant detected in Britain has nine mutations, rather than just one as is usually common, he said.

However, he said he was confident 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".

"Scientifically, it is highly likely that the immune response by this vaccine also can deal with the new virus variant," he said, as per an NDTV report.

But if needed, "in principle the beauty of the messenger technology is that 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," he was quoted as saying.

He said tests are being run on the variant, with results expected in two weeks.

"We have scientific confidence that the vaccine might protect but we will only know it if the experiment is done... we will publish the data as soon as possible," he added.