Pfizer's COVID vaccine could fight against variants thanks to its tech

Good afternoon, readers.

What’s in a dose?

I decided to go down this admittedly nerdy rabbit hole given this morning’s announcement that Pfizer and BioNTech are planning on testing a third dose in addition to their two-dose vaccine regimen in order to tackle trickier coronavirus strains such as the mutations we’ve seen in the U.K. and South Africa. The technology underlying the Pfizer vaccine is what makes that possible thanks to its flexibility.

Technically speaking, the term “dosage” wasn’t around till about the late 1860s. And that was just in chemistry fields. In broader medical terms, it was more like the mid-1870s before it became a commonly accepted medical term to refer to the administration and level of medical products given to a patient and the schedule which dictates that regimen.

We’ve already seen a push for more universal coronavirus vaccines as this bug, inevitably, evolves. As my colleague Jeremy Kahn succinctly summarized last week: “So far, the solution vaccine makers and governments have proposed is to begin preparing updated versions of the existing vaccines that will prompt the immune system to make antibodies to the modified spike protein found in the new variants.”

That spike protein is the thing that a virus uses to latch on to your biological machinery. It’s the entryway for the intruder, its underlying modus operandi. And changes in the new coronavirus variants could affect how an antibody-producing vaccine can fight that sucker.

Enter the messenger RNA (mRNA) technology at the heart of the Pfizer COVID vaccine. There’s a bit of flexibility when it comes to new variants because an mRNA vaccine doesn’t depend on developing hordes of antigens, those pesky little things that help induce an immune response.

It relies on genetic information and therefore can be engineered a little bit more on the fly and earlier on in the disease-fighting process. You don’t need to get a vaccine pumped into you so much as providing your body with a set of instructions on what it needs to produce to fight the bug.

The crux is the genetic code, and the necessary materials are already present in your existing cells. That’s a pretty big advantage over conventional vaccines, though it’s still important to keep manufacturing roadblocks in mind.

In the case of this booster shot being prepped by Pfizer, which is specifically meant to tackle the coronavirus variant in South Africa, the company said they were able to develop the helper in just six to eight weeks.

“If the virus mutates beyond what we see today, we will already have data on how to do a strain shift and rapidly change production,” Mikael Dolsten, chief scientific officer at Pfizer, tells Time. “We could just feed the production process with a different mRNA and everything else would be the same.”

Read on for the day’s news, and see you next week.

Sy Mukherjee
sy.mukherjee@fortune.com
@the_sy_guy

DIGITAL HEALTH

The pandemic led to a surge for the telehealth industry. Will it last? We've previously reported on the ways that the pandemic has lifted all boats in the telehealth ocean. But at least one recent earnings report from digital health giant Teladoc could prove an early warning sign for the industry. In a 4th quarter 2020 earnings report, the firm said that while it saw initial membership and revenue growth in 2020, paid membership was still pretty much flat. Analysts are a bit conflicted around the data, and we'll still have to see how this dynamic goes forward. For instance, SVB Leerink analyst Stephanie Davis noted that the company tends to be pretty conservative in its earnings report calls. "I feel very, very good about continued membership growth. And we look at it over sort of a multiyear or not a quarter-by-quarter question," said Teladoc CEO Jason Corevic during the call. (Barron's)

INDICATIONS

Moderna chief medical officer set to leave the company this year. I'll have more on this soon. But this morning, Moderna, one of only two companies to currently have authorized COVID vaccines in the U.S., announced that chief medical officer Tal Zaks will be departing in the fall. Zaks has been at the firm for six years and spearheaded a remarkable effort for mRNA-based technology, which has faced plenty of skepticism in the past. We'll have plenty to learn from his experience at the bleeding edge of biotech.

THE BIG PICTURE

Leadership in the era of COVID inequity. Fortune assembled a rock-star panel of female executives from Twitter, LinkedIn, and Major League Baseball yesterday to discuss one of the most important issues the COVID pandemic has brought into the societal limelight: the disproportionate effect on people of color and what industries can do to deal with it. I found this particular nugget, about Jennifer Christie, the head of human resources at Twitter, especially important: Christie said the company is trying to achieve that goal by recruiting across a larger swath of the country. The goal is to reach more underserved communities and prevent the bottlenecks that can make American firms look very different from the nation as a whole.

"We were really focused on hiring talent in one location, really in California, and that limited our ability to tap into a much broader, more diverse, frankly, pool of tech talent that are really across the globe," said Christie, whose company is based in San Francisco, which has a decidedly unlevel playing field across the socioeconomic spectrum. (Fortune)