Pfizer has raised the stakes of the COVID-19 vaccine business. The company has launched a midstage trial of the first in a planned series of next-generation, variant-busting COVID-19 vaccines that the drugmaker is working on with BioNTech.
The bivalent shot, dubbed BNT162b5, consists of RNAs that encode enhanced prefusion spike proteins for both the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 and the omicron variant that is prevalent worldwide.