Pfizer and BioNTech announced on Friday that their Covid vaccine is effective against one of the mutations in the new infectious variants identified in Britain and South Africa.
Independent experts said the findings were good news, but warned that each of the coronavirus variants had several other potentially dangerous mutations that had not yet been investigated. It is therefore possible that one of the mutations affects how well the vaccine works.
“This is the first step in the right direction,” says Dr. John Brooks, Chief Medical Officer for the Covid-19 Disease Control Centers. “I hope the additional work that appears in the future will be consistent with the finding.”
The new variant, known as B.1.1.7, first became a concern in December when British researchers realized that it was rapidly becoming more common among people with Covid-19. Since then, it has appeared in 45 countries.
Subsequent research has confirmed that it has the ability to spread more easily from person to person. On Friday, Public Health England released a new study from B.1.1.7 in which researchers estimate that the variant is 30 to 50 percent more transmissible than other forms of the virus.
The virus line leading to B.1.1.7 built up 23 mutations. Scientists are particularly concerned about eight mutations that affect the gene for a protein called peak on the surface of coronaviruses. This is because the viruses use the protein to invade human cells. It is possible that one or more of them B.1.1.7 helps to invade cells more successfully.
One of these mutations, known as N501Y, is of particular concern. Experiments have shown that it enables the virus to bind more tightly to cells. And it has also originated in other generations of the coronavirus, including a variant that was identified in South Africa in December. The variant, called B.1.351, has spread rapidly through the country and has so far spread to a dozen other countries.
In the new study, published online Thursday and not yet a formal scientific investigation, researchers from the University of Texas’ medical branch conducted an experiment to see if the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine against viruses with the N501Y mutation work. They found that the mutant virus in cells in the laboratory could not mix human cells mixed with antibodies from vaccines. The antibodies are clamped to the coronaviruses and prevent them from trapping in cells. Despite the N501Y mutation, the experiment showed that the antibodies produced by vaccines could still cling to the viruses.
“This indicates that the major N501Y mutation, found in emerging varieties in the UK and South Africa, does not resist the immune responses elicited by Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine,” the companies said in a statement. news release said.