THE BRAINS BEHIND THE BREAKTHROUGH

The husband-and-wife duo behind Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine say they felt it was their duty to find a solution

Dr Özlem TÜreci and her husband, Dr Ugur Sahin, managed to develop an experimental vaccine together with American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which has been found to be more than 90% effective in preventing Covid-19.

ACOUPLE meet as university students, bond over a shared passion for science, get married and devote their lives to developing drugs to fight diseases that blight humankind. Then a deadly pandemic comes along and wipes out close to 1,5 million people in a few harrowing months. The couple work around the clock to come up with a vaccine to help liberate the globe from the grip of the killer virus – and they do just that.

It may sound more like something from a Hollywood movie but this is the real-life story of scientists Dr Ugur Sahin (55) and Dr Özlem Türeci (53), the dream team behind one of the vaccines that could halt the relentless march of Covid-19.

The husband and wife head up the German biotech company BioNTech, which has developed a vaccine in conjunction with US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer.

As parts of the world prepare to start rolling out doses of the eagerly anticipated vaccine, the couple, who both hail from Turkish immigrant families, remain characteristically modest about their success.

“The trial results were above all a victory for innovation, science and of a global collaborative effort. It might hopefully help the world regain a sense of normalcy,” says Ugur, who co-founded BioNTech in 2008 with his wife, who’s the company’s chief medical officer.

The pair are well known in medical and scientific circles for their expertise, unrelenting work ethic and entrepreneurial zeal.

In fact, when Ugur first read about Covid-19 and its potential impact on the global population in a medical journal in January, he knew he had to jump on it fast.

He gathered his 1 000-plus employees, told them to cancel any upcoming skiing holidays they might have booked and set them to work.

“There aren’t too many companies on the planet that have the capacity and the competence to do it as fast as we could do it,” Ugur says.

“So it felt not like an opportunity, but a duty to do it because I realised we could be among the first coming up with a vaccine.”

He brought Pfizer on board to help with development and distribution costs and by November they had their breakthrough. After widespread clinical trials, their vaccine had proved to be nearly 94% effective in protecting people from transmission. And so hope was born.

Of course, you can’t ignore the huge financial profits both BioNTech and Pfizer are set to gain.

BioNTech’s market shares have already soared to a whopping $21 billion, (R315bn) making the couple among the richest people in Germany.

There’s also talk they’ll be up for consideration for the Nobel Prize for medicine next year.

Yet for all the accolades and money, these two remain modest and low-key, with Ugur cycling to work everyday on a mountain bike and rocking up to work meetings in jeans with his backpack in hand.

‘It might hopefully help the world regain a sense of normalcy’

THE couple’s story is a rags-toriches tale that’s both inspiring and heartwarming. Ugur was born in Istanbul, Turkey, and raised in Germany where his parents worked in a Ford car factory. As a child he was football-mad but could also often be found with his nose buried in a science book from the library.

He soon discovered medicine was his passion and after school studied it at the University of Cologne. In 1993 he graduated with a doctorate and went on to become a professor and researcher focusing on immunotherapy.

It was while working at teaching hospitals in Germany that he met Özlem, the daughter of a Turkish doctor who’d immigrated from Istanbul.

She grew up in Lastrup, Lower Saxony, where her father worked as a surgeon in a small Catholic hospital.

Özlem initially wanted to become a nun, having developed an admiration for nuns after observing them care for patients in the small hospital where her father worked.

In the end she opted to study medicine at Saarland University in the town of

Last year Ugur was awarded the coveted Mustafa Prize, a biennial Iranian prize awarded to top Muslim researchers and scientists.

Homburg – which is where her path crossed with Ugur’s.

They immediately bonded over a shared love of medical research and teaching and interrupted their work briefly in 2002 to dash to the registry office to get married. Their daughter was born four years later.

Today they live in Mainz, a city on the river Rhine, where BioNTech has its headquarters.

Their lives as entrepreneurs started in 2001 when they set up Ganymed Pharmaceuticals, which developed cancer-fighting drugs.

“We called it that – not after the handsome hero of Greek myth but a Turkish expression roughly meaning ‘earned through hard work’,” Özlem told a local newspaper.

In 2016 they sold the company to a Japanese company for €1,4bn (then R21bn). In 2008 they founded their second company, BioNTech, with a focus on developing cancer immunotherapy tools as well

LEFT: More than 1 000 people work at BioNTech’s headquarters in Mainz, Germany (BELOW). The company was founded in 2008. as HIV and tuberculosis programmes.

Ugur already had big dreams, telling a local newspaper at the time, “We want to build a large European pharmaceutical company.” And his words have rung true.

TSHE company developed a reputation as a leader in its field and had soon branched out into other German cities as well as Cambridge near Boston in the US. In 2018 Ugur and Özlem first partnered with Pfizer – one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in America – on a flu vaccine.

But what started out as a working relationship between the two companies’ CEOs soon spilled over into a personal one too.

“We realised that he is from Greece and I’m from Turkey,” Ugur says of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla (59). “It was very personal from the very beginning. Trust and a personal relationship are very important in an industry where everything is going so fast.”

Last year Ugur was awarded the coveted Mustafa Prize, a biennial Iranian prize for Muslims who excel in science and technology.

Yet for all their accolades and fame, the billionaire couple remain incredibly humble.

They live in a modest flat near their office and either get around on bike or on foot. Neither owns a car.

“Ugur is a very, very unique individual,” Albert says. “He cares only about science. Discussing business isn’t his cup of tea. He doesn’t like it at all. He’s a scientist and a man of principles.”

Many have hailed the fact that two scientists of Turkish descent have done so well in a country that suffers a hangover from its torrid past.

“With this couple, Germany has become a shining example of successful integration,” business site Focus writes.

When asked if he’d take the vaccine himself, Ugur told Germany’s Business Insider, “First we have to make sure that the vaccine arrives with those people who need it urgently, especially the elderly, people with pre-existing conditions and medical staff.

“But as soon as the vaccine has been permitted to be available to all, I will be the first do it.”