Pfizer and BioNTech announced on Friday that their Covid vaccine is effective against one of the mutations present in the new contagious variants identified in Britain and South Africa.
Independent experts said the findings are good news, but warned that each of these variants of the coronavirus has several other potentially dangerous mutations that have not yet been investigated. Therefore, it is possible that one of these mutations will affect the functioning of the vaccine.
“It’s the first step in the right direction,” said Dr. John Brooks, medical director of the Covid-19 Emergency Response Disease Control Center. “I hope that the additional work that will be launched in the future is in line with this discovery.”
The new variant, known as B.1.1.7, caused concern for the first time in December, when British researchers realized that it was quickly becoming more common among people with Covid-19. It has since 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 by B.1.1.7 in which the researchers estimated that the variant is 30 to 50 percent more transmissible than other forms of the virus.
The viral line that leads to B.1.1.7 has accumulated 23 mutations. Of particular concern to scientists are the eight mutations that affect the gene for a protein called pico on the surface of coronaviruses. That’s because viruses use the protein spike to cling to human cells. It is possible that one or more of them will help B.1.1.7 to invade cells more successfully.
One such mutation, known as N501Y, is of particular concern. Experiments have shown that it allows the virus to bind cells more firmly. It also appeared in other strains of the coronavirus, including a variant identified in South Africa in December. This variant, called B.1.351, has spread rapidly across the country and has spread to a dozen other countries so far.
In the new study, which was posted online on Thursday and has yet to undergo a formal scientific review, researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch conducted an experiment to see if the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine worked against viruses with the N501Y mutation. They found that in laboratory cells, the mutant virus did not infect human cells mixed with antibodies from vaccinated people. The antibodies clung to the coronaviruses and prevented them from infiltrating the cells. Despite the N501Y mutation, the experiment showed that the antibodies generated by the vaccine were still able to bind to viruses.
“This indicates that the key N501Y mutation, found in emerging variants in the UK and South Africa, does not create resistance to the immune responses induced by the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine,” the companies said in a press release.