Scientists Who Developed Pfizer / BioNTech Covid-19 Vaccine Are Powerful Turkish-German Couple

Sahin, 55, and Tureci, 53, created BioNTech in the city of Mainz, central Germany, in 2008. On Monday, the company’s partner, US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, said its candidate vaccine was over 90% effective in preventing infection in volunteers.

“I think the right message for humanity is that we now understand that COVID-19 infections can indeed be prevented with a vaccine,” he said.

Speaking to CNN on Monday, Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, called it the “greatest medical breakthrough” in the past 100 years.

While the vaccine is a huge milestone for the scientific community, Sahin and Tureci are veterans in the world of medical achievement.

The couple, both doctors by training, formed their previous company, Ganymed Pharmaceuticals, in 2001 to work on developing anti-cancer antibodies, eventually selling them for $ 1.4 billion in 2016.

According to the weekly Welt am Sonntag, managing director Sahin and medical director Tureci are among the 100 richest people in Germany. On Tuesday, the market value of their Nasdaq-listed company jumped to $ 25.72 billion – a massive jump from $ 4.6 billion last year.

But the couple’s charitable ethos and long-standing commitment to academia and science appear to have kept them on the ground, even as their work on the Covid-19 vaccine propels them into the global spotlight.

In May, the couple told CNN they felt obligated to “provide something for society” given the work they had done in their field over the past two decades.

Sahin was born in Iskenderun, a town on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. He moved to Cologne, Germany, at the age of four, where his father worked at a local Ford factory, according to Reuters.

He met Tureci, the daughter of a Turkish doctor, when the two embarked on their academic careers.

Sahin and Tureci are linked by a shared passion for cancer research, according to Reuters, which reported that the couple even started their marriage in the research lab.

In January, after reading a scientific article on the coronavirus in Wuhan, China, Sahin was taken by the “small step” from anti-cancer mRNA drugs to viral mRNA vaccines, Reuters reported.

BioNTech assigned 500 of its staff to work on the project with several potential mRNA compounds, eventually entering into a partnership with Pfizer in March.

Their approach to the Covid-19 vaccine uses genetic material, mRNA, to trick cells into producing pieces of protein that look like pieces of the virus. The immune system learns to recognize and attack these elements and, in theory, would respond quickly to any real infection.

Sahin has been described as a “lowly and humble” person by colleagues including Matthias Theobald, a fellow oncology professor at the University of Mainz, who has worked with him for two decades.

“Despite his accomplishments, he has never changed from being incredibly humble and personal,” Matthias Kromayer, a member of the board of directors of venture capital firm MIG AG, which has financially supported BioNTech, told Reuters.

These attributes ring clear when listening to Sahin talk about the global race to stop the virus.

On Tuesday, he said he believed the BioNTech / Pfizer vaccine “won’t be the only vaccine” against Covid-19, noting that a number of Phase 3 vaccine trials are underway.

Sahin also said that BioNTech’s goal, in cooperation with Pfizer, is to ramp up production of their vaccine candidate and that they hope to manufacture up to 1.3 billion doses by the end of 2021, if it receives an authorization.

He reiterated that BioNTech and Pfizer were planning to ask the United States Food and Drug Administration to authorize emergency use of the vaccine, with that request possibly coming as early as next week.