Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine appears to work against the mutation in new strains of coronavirus.

The two strains share a mutation known as N501Y that scientists fear could allow the virus to avoid the immune protection generated by a vaccine.

In research published online on Thursday, scientists found that antibodies from people who received the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine “showed no reduction in neutralization activity” against a version of the virus that carries the N501Y mutation, which they created in laboratory.

This particular mutation appears to help the virus bind to human cells, which may partly explain why these new strains appear to be more transmissible. But it is just one of many mutations in both strains that scientists fear could make the virus less susceptible to vaccines or treatments.

The study – conducted by researchers at Pfizer and the University of Texas Medical Branch – does not test the complete set of these mutations, nor has it been peer-reviewed.

Although viruses are expected to mutate – often in ways that are neutral or even harmful to the virus – experts say the whole is not merely the sum of the parts: some mutations are known to interact with each other, occasionally changing shape or form. function of structures like the protein spike.

“A limitation of this study is that the mutation was tested in isolation,” said Deborah Dunn-Walters, chairman of the British Society for Immunology task force on Covid-19 and immunology, in a statement. She noted that mutations that can have a compound effect “must be tested together”.

Because people generally produce more than one type of antibody against a virus, experts say that such a mutation is unlikely to make the virus completely resistant to a vaccine. However, experts are not sure that the new strains will have no impact.

“We need to see the real protection of new variants in clinical trial participants who are still going on to make sure the vaccine is equally effective,” Alexander Edwards, associate professor of biomedical technology at the University of Reading pharmacy school in the UK Kingdom, said in a statement. Neither Edwards nor Dunn-Walters was involved in the new research.

In a statement last month, Pfizer said it carried out similar tests on “several mutant strains. To date, we have found consistent coverage of all strains tested”.

It will be important to continue “monitoring the importance of changes to immunization coverage,” the researchers wrote in the new article.

This is due to the “possibility that a future mutation … may require a change in the vaccine strain”. Vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna use genetic technology that would allow vaccines to be quickly adapted to compensate for mutations, they noted.