The co-founder of BioNTech, Ugur Sahin, said on Tuesday that its recently developed vaccine against COVID-19 can work against the new strain of coronavirus that emerged in Britain, however, the pharmaceutical giant could also adapt another vaccine if necessary in six weeks, AFP reported.

“Scientifically, it is highly likely that the immune response by this vaccine also can deal with the new virus variant,” said Sahin.

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But if needed, “in principle the beauty of the messenger technology is that we can directly start to engineer a vaccine which completely mimics this new mutation — we could be able to provide a new vaccine technically within six weeks,” he added.

Sahin stated that the new strain detected in Britain has nine mutations, rather than just one as is usually common.

The BioNTech chief voiced confidence that the vaccine developed with Pfizer would be efficient because it “contains more than 1,000 amino acids, and only nine of them have changed, so that means 99% of the protein is still the same.”

“We have scientific confidence that the vaccine might protect but we will only know it if the experiment is done… we will publish the data as soon as possible,” he added.