New Delhi: As the new and more deadly strain of the coronavirus is found in the United Kingdom, Ugur Sahin co-founder of BioNTech, on Tuesday, said that his company’s vaccine "highly likely" to work against the mutated strain of the virus and if needed, an improvised version of the vaccine can be developed within six weeks.

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

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".

Reports of the new variant of the virus in the UK have caused panic around the world after scientists in the UK described a newly identified variant of the Covid-19 virus that appears to be more contagious than, and genetically distinct from, more established variants.

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The new form of the virus is being called VUI-202012/01- VUI stands for “Virus Under Investigation”. According to the scientist in the UK, the impact of the mutated has led to the recent surge in the Covid-19 cases in the country. Following the recent development of the coronavirus pandemic, several countries have imposed restrictions on travelers from the UK.

As per reports, the mutated version of the Sars-Cov-2 virus could be 70 per cent more transmissible than the old variant.

The total number of cases in the UK currently stands at 2.07 million and the country has recorded 67,616. In the last 24-hours, the country recorded 33,364 new cases and 215 deaths.