This Couple Aimed To Cure Cancer, But Made Vaccine That Can End COVID-19 Pandemic
As people in the UK continue to get vaccinated, their eyes are also turning towards the team that made this happen -- a team of husband and wife physicians Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci -- founders of BioNTech.
This year has been nothing short of dreadful for us. We¡¯ve spent the entire year keeping ourselves safe from the novel coronavirus and hoping for the day a vaccine finally comes to take down SARS CoV-2 once and for all.
And last week, the UK finally authorised use of Pfizer-BioNTech¡¯s COVID-19 vaccine for its citizens, becoming the first nation to do so.
And as people in the UK continue to get vaccinated, their eyes are also turning towards the team that made this happen: A team of husband and wife physicians Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci -- founders of BioNTech.
While the month of January told the world how dangerous COVID-19 in China could get on a global level, the couple began working on the vaccine in January itself, after reading a medical journal which indicated that the disease had the potential to transform into a full-grown pandemic.
Turkish roots of BioNTech founders
Both scientists are children of Turkish migrants. Ugur Sahin was four years old when he arrived in Germany from the Mediterranean coast. Ozlem Tureci, on the other hand, was the daughter of a surgeon who worked at a small catholic hospital and had migrated from Istanbul. She was raised in Lastrup, Lower Saxony.
Sahin graduated as a doctor from the University of Cologne in 1990. Tureci earned her Doctor of Medicine degree at the Saarland University Faculty of medicine in Homburg, Germany. They got married in 2002.
BioNTech
They were actually trying to cure cancer
The couple were working together at Mainz university hospital where they wanted to investigate if immune systems could be trained to take down cancerous cells.
However, it was really challenging for them to seek funding, so instead, they started their own company in 2001 dubbed Ganymed as revealed by Sahin in a conversation with news portal Heise. Here they pioneered antibody therapies against cancer and later sold the company to Japanese pharmaceutical giant Astellas for 1.4 billion Euros in 2016.
They found another company in 2008 dubbed BioNTech, teaming up with Austrian oncologist Christoph Huber, where they were working to develop immunotherapy treatments for cancer using mRNA based genetic material, helping the human body to make its own antigene.
BioNTech
Developing the COVID vaccine
Reported first by WSJ, When Sahin first read about COVID-19, he summoned his employees telling them they¡¯d be shifting their focus to finding a solution for SARS CoV-2. Even though several employees disagreed, he persisted.
Pfizer had already worked with BioNTech in the past on a flu vaccine so when they found out that they have a plan to make the next COVID-19 vaccine, they agreed to collaborate.
As March rolled up BioNTech had 20 candidates for a vaccine where it would test it for five immune reactions in a research programme dubbed Lightspeed which also had 500 other scientists. In November, they finally saw the vaccine trials reveal that it¡¯s over 90 percent effective against the novel coronavirus, followed by 95 percent just a few days later.
Reuters
Humble to the core
The power couple is worth billions of dollars. According to German newspaper, Welt am Sonntag, they¡¯re ranked at 93rd spot among the richest Germans in the nation. The company BioNTech is currently valued at $21.9 billion. However, despite all this, Sahin is still known to cycle to his office every day.
