GERMANY: The Chief Executive Officer(CEO) of the BioNTech SE, Ugur Sahin, has recently expressed the need for a new formulation to protect against the coronavirus as it would mutate by the middle of next year.
The CEO of a German biotechnology company said that mutations would emerge that can evade the body's immune defences as time passes. He predicted that [a different vaccine] was completely unneeded this year, but it could be a different situation by mid next year.
German Biotech and US pharmaceutical company Pfizer together brought the first COVID-19 vaccine to market. Also, it was the first vaccine based on mRNA technology to win regulatory approval. This vaccine also became the best-selling drug around the globe this year.
The CEO said that the COVID-19 variants were more contagious, particularly the Delta strain, but not different enough to threaten the effectiveness of current vaccines. Booster shots seemed to tackle the main variants, Sahin said, but the virus would eventually develop mutations that could escape the immune response by the vaccine. He added that these developing mutations would necessitate a 'tailored' version to target the new strain specifically.
"COVID-19 virus will stay and will further adapt, and we have no reason to assume that the next generation virus will be easier to handle for the immune system than the existing generation", he said.