When will we get back to normal life ?: Scientist reveals

One of the founders of BioNTech, a company that produces with Pfizer one of the vaccinations advanced against Covid-19, spoke of the time it would take for humanity to return to a life like the one it had before pandemic.

According to Ugur Sahin, CEO of BioNTech, “We could go back to normal life in the middle of next year“.

This was said in an interview with the Sky News Network, in which he also mentioned that people in the UK could be vaccinated from next month. Therefore, the government of this country is preparing to start with vaccinationeven in stadiums. Although he commented that the times are also related to legal approvals.

It all depends on the success of vaccine projects and coronavirus treatments, but experts give favorable forecasts and estimate that a vaccine will be on the market next month, as is the case with Pfizer and BioNTech, who say their vaccine is 90% effective according to what has been seen in the tests .

However, there are also experts who do not see that partial results are made public and prefer to wait until the end of phase three of the tests, that is to say the clinical trial with patients.

Meanwhile, the European Union intends to conclude a contract with BioNTech and Pfizer for the acquisition of 300 million doses intended for the 27 member countries of the community bloc.

An immigrant who became a hope

The vaccine developed between Pfizer and BioNTech is one of the most advanced today

Sahin is a 55-year-old researcher who came to Germany with his parents, two Turkish immigrants, at the age of four, and now, through his pharmaceutical company BioNTech, has become the face of “global hope” in the fight against SARS-CoV-2 (scientific name for type 2 coronavirus), which causes Covid-19.

“The father of the miracle vaccine”, as described by the tabloid daily Bild, the most read in Germany; “Ugur Sahin: a modest visionary”, summarizes the information network; “A success born in Cologne,” says “Express”, a popular regional newspaper in North Rhine-Westphalia, where the city is located.

The common denominator between the different ways of approaching the profile of the founder of BioNTech is his German-Turkish condition. A child came to the country with his parents in the 1960s, like so many other Turkish families.

He is not the only face of hope deposited in this vaccine, since he is accompanied by his wife and colleague Özlem Türeci, two years younger, also of Turkish origin, although born in Germany – in Lastrup, in the center of the country.

This German-Turkish marriage of scientists founded BioNTech in 2008, with the support of various partners. They chair its board of directors, which also includes Americans Sean Marett and Sierk Poetting.

It is a relatively young company, with a workforce of 1,320 employees, until now focused on researching immune therapies for cancer patients. Sahin’s biggest success to date has been the German Cancer Prize 2019.

Sahin, born in Iskender and professor of experimental oncology in Mainz, like his wife, started working on the application of his research on the coronavirus in January.

Sahin and Türeci act as “inventors” of the technology with which the vaccine was developed. To its American partners, to produce and distribute it worldwide as soon as possible. The goal is to reach 1.3 billion doses by next year, which the pharmaceutical company “gold mine” would not be able to achieve on its own resources.

Ugur Sahin and Oezlem Tuereci, a science and business “dream team”.

The “dream team” in action

For Kromayer of MIG, Tuereci and Sahin are a “dream Team“In the sense that they have reconciled their visions with the limits of reality.

BioNTech’s story took a turn in January, when Sahin stumbled across a scientific paper on a new coronavirus outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan and was surprised at the small size of the shift from anti-cancer drugs to mRNA to vaccines to virus base. in mRNA.

BioNTech quickly assigned around 500 employees to work on various possible compounds and was successful in convincing pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and Chinese pharmacist Fosun as partners in March..

Matthias Theobald, professor of oncology at the University of Mainz who has worked with Sahin for 20 years, said his discretion masks a relentless ambition to transform medicine, exemplified by the leap of faith to obtain a COVID-19 vaccine.

“He is a very modest and humble person. Appearances do not matter to him. But he wants to create the structures that allow him to realize his visions and this is where his aspirations are far from modest,” said Theobald.

Sahin told Reuters on Monday that the reading equated to an “extraordinary success rate” but that he did not know earlier in the year how difficult the task would be overall.

“It’s certainly not something that one can easily express as a serious scientist, but it was within the realm of possibility from the start.”