Behind vaccine, an understated husband-and-wife team
POSITIVE data on BioNTech and US partner Pfizer Inc’s COVID-19 vaccine is an unlikely success for the married couple behind the German biotech firm, who have devoted their lives to harnessing the immune system against cancer. Pfizer said on Monday its experimental vaccine was more than 90 per cent effective in preventing COVID-19 based on initial data from a large study.
Pfizer and BioNTech are the first drugmakers to show successful data from a largescale clinical trial of a coronavirus vaccine. The companies said they have so far found no serious safety concerns and expect to seek US emergency use authorization later this month.
From humble roots as the son of a Turkish immigrant working at a Ford factory in Cologne, BioNTech Chief Executive Uğur Şahin, 55, now figures among the 100 richest Germans, together with his wife and fellow board member Özlem Türeci, 53, according to weekly WeltamSonntag.
Together they honed in on the immune system as a potential ally in the fight against cancer and tried to address the unique genetic makeup of each tumour.
The BioNTech story took a twist when Şahin in January came across a scientific paper on a new coronavirus outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan and it struck him how small the step was from anti-cancer mRNA drugs to mRNA-based viral vaccines.
BioNTech quickly assigned about 500 staff to project “light speed” to work on several possible compounds, winning pharma giant Pfizer and Chinese drugmaker Fosun as partners in March.
Matthias Theobald, a fellow oncology professor at Mainz university who has worked with Şahin for 20 years, said his tendency towards understatement belies a relentless ambition to transform medicine, exemplified by the leap of faith to a COVID-19 vaccine.
Şahin told Reuters on Monday the readout amounted to an “extraordinary success rate” but that he did not know earlier in the year how difficult the task overall would be.
“It’s certainly not something that you would easily voice as a serious scientist, but it was within the realms of possibility from the beginning.”