Pfizer's vaccine protective against Beta, Gamma variant of Coronavirus: Study
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As per the study, the Pfizer BNT162b2 vaccination worked well against the majority of variants. However, the vaccine neutralized the South African variant and the Brazil variant with a 3-fold decrease in titer.
The Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine can 'effectively neutralize' the Beta and Gamma variant of the deadly virus, according to a new study led by researchers from the New York University.
As per the study, the Pfizer BNT162b2 vaccination worked well against the majority of variants. However, the vaccine neutralized the South African variant and the Brazil variant with a 3-fold decrease in titer.
Published in the journal mBio, the study revealed that a monoclonal antibody cocktail, which consists of casirivamab and imdevimab might be less effective against SARS-CoV-2 variants in laboratory experiments. This was after lab experiments on Regeneron pharmaceuticals' REGN-COV2, which is a 2 recombinant monoclonal antibody cocktail, showed that casirivamab had lost some of its neutralizing activity against the South African and Brazilian variants. It also showed that the cocktail was 9- to 15- fold decreased in titer.
As a part of the research, the team created a panel of pseudotyped viruses. This was done using the spike proteins from 6 different variants of SARS-CoV-2. These included the B117 lineage variant identified in the UK, the B1351 lineage variant identified in South Africa, the B11248 lineage variant identified in Brazil, the COH.20G/677H lineage variant identified in Columbus Ohio, the 20 EUs variant identified in Spain, and later found elsewhere in Europe, and the Mink cluster five spike proteins located in minks in Denmark.
Nathaniel "Ned" Landau, Professor in the Department of Microbiology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine said, "Our interpretation of the results is that the vaccine antibodies are very powerful, and even if you lose 3-fold of the titer, there is still plenty of antibody there to neutralize the virus. We believe the findings demonstrate that the vaccines will remain protective against the variants that we tested".
Landau noted, "The question with this work is 'how do the laboratory findings translate into clinical effects, that is what will happen when you treat a patient infected with one of the variants?' We cannot say for sure. We will only know when the clinical data comes in".
As per Landau, similar experiments in Moderna's Covid vaccine also showed the same results.