How a couple’s quest to cure cancer led to the West’s first COVID-19 vaccine

MAINZ, Germany – The story of the first Covid-19 vaccine to be cleared in the West began 30 years ago in rural Germany when two young doctors, children of Turkish migrants and newly in love, pledged to invent a new treatment for the cancer.

It took 10 months for Germany’s BioNTech SE and its US partner Pfizer Inc. to develop the vaccine which obtained emergency use authorization in the UK on Wednesday, breaking the previous Western record for a vaccine from more than three years.

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Yet for the founders of BioNTech, Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci, the husband and wife team behind this successful venture, it was the result of three decades of work, long before the appearance of the coronavirus in humans in winter. latest.

When the pandemic broke, Dr Sahin had spent years studying mRNA, genetic instructions that can be passed on to the body to help it defend against viruses and other threats. In January, days before the disease was diagnosed in Europe, he used this knowledge to design a version of the vaccine on his personal computer.

“The success of Ugur and Özlem is a fantastic combination of two people who complement each other,” said Rolf Zinkernagel, a Swiss Nobel Prize winner who previously employed Dr Sahin in his Zurich laboratory. “He’s an innovative scientist, and she’s an amazing clinician with a great sense of running a business.

Teleprinter	security	Latest	Change	Change%
PFE	PFIZER INC.	39.41	+1.10	+ 2.87%
BNTX	BIONTECH SE	114.01	-10.23	-8.23%

Dr Sahin was born in Iskenderun on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey in 1965. He moved to Germany four years later when his father was recruited to work at a Ford factory near Cologne as part of a policy to rebuilding post-war Germany with foreign labor.

Surgeon Dr Türeci’s father came to Germany around the same time to work at a Catholic hospital in the small town of Lastrup, where she grew up inspired by the nuns who cared for her father’s patients. After considering becoming a nun herself, she followed in her father’s footsteps.

Dr Sahin and Dr Türeci said their frustration as young doctors with the dearth of options faced by cancer patients for whom chemotherapy had stopped working had driven their work on mRNA. .

When the two met at Homburg University Hospital in the 1990s, “we realized that with standard therapy we would quickly get to a point where we had nothing to offer patients,” said Dr Türeci. “It was a formative experience.”

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The couple wrote their doctoral theses on experimental therapies. Christoph Huber, then head of the department of hematology and oncology at Johannes – Gutenberg University in Mainz and now non-executive director of BioNTech, persuaded them to join his faculty. There they began to research new treatments based on programming the body’s immune system to defeat cancer as an infectious disease.

In 2001, the couple created their first company, Ganymed Pharmaceuticals GmbH, to develop antibody therapy. Dr Türeci was Managing Director and Dr Sahin was responsible for research.

“The motivation… was to bridge the gap between science and survival: in our research, we saw solutions that we couldn’t bring to our patients’ hospital beds,” said Dr Türeci.

One day in 2002, Dr Sahin and Dr Türeci left their lab around lunchtime and went to the registry office, where they got married before putting on their lab coats and returning to work.

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The couple’s first and largest funders were Andreas and Thomas Strüngmann, twin brothers and billionaire investors who have poured more than € 200 million, or $ 241 million, into the couple’s businesses since 2001.

“Ugur is the visionary who shows us the future, and Özlem then tells us how to get there,” said Helmut Jeggle, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of BioNTech and Director of the Strüngmann Family Office. The brothers, he said, were happy to give the two scientists ample strategic leeway.

In 2008, Drs. Sahin and Türeci founded BioNTech to expand their research into mRNA antibody treatments. Since Ganymed was sold for $ 1.4 billion in 2016 and the couple reinvested the proceeds in their new business, BioNTech has been their sole focus.

All of BioNTech’s executive directors are scientists, including finance and business directors. The CEO retains his teaching position at the local university, where he is training a doctorate. candidates, sometimes with an eye on recruiting.

When talking about his work, Dr Sahin, who wears a Turkish amulet known as the nazar around his neck, often searches for the chalkboard to sketch out formulas.

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The BioNTech team, half of whom are women, includes scientists from 60 nationalities, including mRNA authorities like Katalin Kariko, professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

“Most biotech CEOs are salespeople, but Ugur is a scientist who convinced me because the science is good here,” said Professor Kariko, who is Hungarian. “There is no model for our products, no one has ever done that before.”

On January 25, a Saturday, after reading a study that he said convinced him that the obscure disease in China would soon engulf the world, Dr. Sahin set to work on his computer, designing the model. for 10 possible vaccines against the coronavirus, one of which would become BNT162b2, the vaccine authorized on Wednesday in the UK.

Later that day, he told Mr Jeggle that BioNTech would be refocusing its work on tackling a virus that had no name yet and had not yet been diagnosed in Europe.

“I was surprised, to say the least,” said Mr. Jeggle, who has worked with Dr. Sahin since 2001. “We didn’t have a lot of free capital and we were tied to our cancer research.

Dr Sahin cited the Hong Kong flu from 1968 to 1969 which killed up to four million people. After two hours, Mr. Jeggle conceded.

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The following Monday, Dr Sahin reorganized his staff into seven-day shifts, asked key workers to cancel their vacations and stop using public transport. Lightspeed Project, as he dubbed the effort, would develop a vaccine in months rather than years, as had been the case until now.

In February, Dr. Sahin observed the effect of the stroke under a microscope. He took a selfie with two employees present. “I think this is the birth of our vaccine candidate,” he said.

BioNTech had worked with Pfizer to develop an influenza vaccine based on mRNA technology. So when Dr. Sahin needed a partner to organize clinical trials on continents, manufacture the product globally, and help distribute it in the United States and Europe, he knew who to turn to. In March, the two companies signed a cooperation agreement, and in April, the first human trials began.

Later, BioNTech acquired an American company and a large pharmaceutical plant in Germany to increase production pending clearance – a high-risk approach if the shot fails.

Morgan Stanley estimated the vaccine could bring Pfizer and BioNTech more than $ 13 billion in revenue. Any proceeds will be reinvested, Dr Sahin said. Its main objective has not changed: to bring anti-cancer treatments based on mRNA and other innovative treatments to the market, 11 of which are currently in clinical trials.

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Many scientists are still skeptical that this can be done. Thomas C. Roberts, senior postdoctoral researcher specializing in mRNA at the University of Oxford, said the vaccine results were exciting, but the application of mRNA beyond the jab would face challenges major.

Back in Mainz, Dr Sahin disagreed, saying the vaccine’s authorization would validate its technology and “usher in a whole new class of drugs.”