Vials containing the Pfizer BioNtech Covid-19 vaccine at Miguel Hidalgo Centenario Hospital in Aguascalientes, Mexico on Thursday, January 14, 2020. The number of confirmed cases of the coronavirus outbreak in Mexico is 1.57 million as of 7:30 AM in Mexico. City, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University and Bloomberg News.
Photographer: Mauricio Palos / Bloomberg
Photographer: Mauricio Palos / Bloomberg
Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE built the case that their Covid-19 vaccine will protect against the new variant of the coronavirus that emerged in the UK with the results of another lab trial.
Like it Previous work from the University of Texas Medical Branch, results published Wednesday showed that antibodies in the blood of vaccinated people were able to neutralize a version of the mutated virus created in the lab. The research is published on the preprint server BioRxiv prior to peer review.
Unlike the previous study, which focused on one pivotal mutation, the new study tested all 10 mutations on the virus’s spike protein, causing it to bind to cells in the host. It’s a promising but inconclusive result as scientists continue to closely monitor whether mutations in the virus could make it necessary to modify the vaccines.
Antibodies in the blood of 16 volunteers in a previous German trial of the vaccine were just as effective against the laboratory-created mutant strain as against the original virus. The result “makes it highly unlikely that the UK variant viruses will escape” protection from the vaccine, wrote the research team, led by BioNTech Chief Executive Officer Ugur Sahin.
The BioNTech team is nonetheless willing to modify the vaccine if necessary in the future, it said. That could become necessary to protect against other tribes amid evidence that another variant emerging in South Africa might be more difficult to control.
A separate study on that tension raised concern. Scientists found that half of the blood samples from a handful of patients who already had Covid-19 do not have the antibodies necessary to protect against the South African variety, which is spreading around the world.
The findings of the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa suggest that those individuals may no longer be protected from reinfection. In the other half, antibody levels were reduced and the risk of reinfection could not be determined, the institute said. The findings were not peer-reviewed and were based on a small sample size.
Separately, a third study from a Rockefeller University team also underlined the importance of closely monitoring the effectiveness of vaccines against variants. The team tested mutations found in the variants first discovered in the UK and South Africa, as well as a third from Brazil, in blood samples from 20 volunteers who had either received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine or a similar shot of Moderna Inc. In their test, the blood samples from the donors were not as effective in neutralizing the variants.
“Vaccines may need to be periodically updated to avoid possible loss of clinical efficacy,” wrote the Rockefeller team. Like the other studies, their work was presented in pre-print, prior to peer review.
(Updates with Rockefeller study in the last two paragraphs)