BioNTech recently published an announcement expressing gratitude to its employees and various partners who have assisted the company in developing a successful COVID-19 vaccine. The BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine has been shown to be 95% effective in preventing COVID-19 and it has received emergency use authorizations from more than 45 countries around the world. Kerafast is very proud to be mentioned as one of the companies contributing to BioNTech’s successful COVID-19 vaccine.

CEO and co-founder of BioNTech, Ugur Sahin, M.D., expressed appreciation to all companies involved: “Despite the damage caused by the virus, I have been inspired each day by the spirit of collaboration and scientific discovery. It is one of the greatest honors of my life to be involved in this effort and to play a role in helping the world regain a sense of normality. I would like to thank each and every person that helped make this a reality.” Click here to see all companies involved in helping BioNTech generate the COVID-19 vaccine.

Our Impact

Kerafast offers a wide variety of research reagents geared to COVID-19 research. BioNTech used several reagents to help in creating their COVID-19 vaccine, including:

• VSV-G [8G5F11] Antibody from the Wake Forest School of Medicine

Used to detect VSV and VSV-G pseudotyped lentiviruses. VSV is a widely used model system for studying viral replication and assembly and evaluating the effectiveness of vaccines.

• Plasmids from the Delta-G-VSV-Pseudotyping System from the University of Tennessee

This “reverse genetics” system has proven to be useful for identifying cellular receptors for viruses, screening for entry inhibitors, and evaluating neutralizing antibody responses after vaccination. It enables studies of SARS-CoV-2 viral entry and COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness at just biosafety level 2 (BSL-2) containment.

• dsRNA [9D5] Antibody from our sister company Absolute Antibody

Antibody binding specifically to double-stranded RNA, which is part of the genetic material of some viruses. This antibody is recombinantly produced for ensured batch-to-batch reproducibility.

Feel free to check out more of our COVID-19 research reagents; view our full list here. We also offer Recombinant Coronavirus Antibodies from Absolute Antibody, SARS-CoV-2 Nucleocapsid Protein Expression Plasmids from Colorado State University, and the Yeast-Display Nanobody Library from Harvard University. The reagents in our catalog have been developed by leading academic laboratories and made readily available to scientists worldwide.