Their experimental work on vaccines that go beyond the current approach includes T-cell booster vaccines, designed primarily to protect against serious diseases.
Germany’s BioNTech, a Pfizer partner in Covid-19 vaccines, has announced that the two companies will begin testing next-generation vaccines in humans in the second half of the year that protect against a wide variety of coronaviruses.
Their experimental work on vaccines that go beyond the current approach include T-cell booster vaccines, designed primarily to protect against serious diseases if the virus becomes more dangerous, and vaccines against any type of coronavirus that protect against the wider family of viruses and their variants.
In a slide show posted on BioNTech’s Investors’ Day website, the German biotechnology company said its goal was to “provide lasting protection against variation”.
The two partners, manufacturers of the most widely used Covid-19 vaccine in the western world, are currently discussing with regulators improved versions of the existing vaccine for better protection against the Omicron variant and its sub-variants.
The persistent mutation of the virus into new variants that escape vaccine protection more easily, as well as the weakening of human immune memory, have contributed to the urgent need for companies, governments and healthcare providers to seek more reliable protection tools.
As part of a push to further boost its infectious disease business, BioNTech said it is working independently on precision antibiotics that kill hyperbacteria that have become resistant to currently available anti-infectives.
BioNTech, which did not say when the tests could begin, relies on PhagoMed technology, which it acquired last October.
The Vienna-based antibiotic maker has been working on enzymes, produced by viruses that kill bacteria that penetrate the bacterial cell wall.
Public health researchers report that the combined number of people who die each year from antibiotic-resistant infections in the United States and the European Union is close to 70,000.
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