BioNTech says it could produce and ship an updated version of its vaccine within 100 days if the new Covid variant detected in southern Africa is found to evade existing immunity.
The German biotechnology company is already investigating whether the vaccine it developed with US drugmaker Pfizer works well against the variant, named Omicron, which has caused concern due to its high number of mutations and initial suggestions that it could be transmitting more quickly.
The company says it will know in two weeks whether its current vaccine is likely to be sufficiently effective against the B.1.1.529 variant, now named Omicron by the World Health Organization, based on lab-based experiments.
If required, BioNTech said it is poised to tweak its vaccine to match it more closely to the new variant.
“Pfizer and BioNTech have taken actions months ago to be able to adapt the mRNA vaccine within six weeks and ship initial batches within 100 days in the event of an escape variant,” the company said in a statement.
The US company Moderna said it was testing three existing Covid-19 vaccine booster candidates against the Omicron variant, and that it would develop a new variant-specific booster against it.
“From the beginning, we have said that as we seek to defeat the pandemic, it is imperative that we are proactive as the virus evolves. The mutations in the Omicron variant are concerning and for several days, we have been moving as fast as possible to execute our strategy to address this variant,” said Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s chief executive.
Other vaccine teams, including Johnson & Johnson, also confirmed on Friday that they were testing the effectiveness of their vaccines against the new variant to assess whether updates were likely to be required. AstraZeneca said it is already conducting research in Botswana and Eswatini, where the variant has been identified, to collect real-world data on how the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine performs against the new variant.
At the moment, concerns about a decline in protection are theoretical based on the very high number of mutations – double that seen in Delta – on the spike protein that the vaccine targets.
Human immune systems make a variety of antibodies that target several different places on the spike, so even if one bit of the spike changes, a vaccine will still typically work well.
However, in B.1.1.529, nearly all the sites that antibodies target are different, and so scientists are particularly concerned this version could turn out to be an “escape variant”.
Prof Wendy Barclay, a virologist at Imperial College London, said the emergence of the variant made it even more crucial for people to access existing vaccines and have second and third doses. “Sometimes quantity [of antibodies] can compensate for the lack of match,” she said. “That is the only vaccine that’s available to us at the moment. We need to make that work as best as we can.”
Vaccines based on mRNA, such as the BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, are thought to be the easiest to alter. But most companies have been preparing for the eventuality of a so-called escape variant and have ambitious timeframes for distributing an updated vaccine, if deemed medically necessary and commercially feasible.