And It Begins--Thanks To A Turkish Couple And Their German Biotech Company

The U.K. just became the first western country to approve a Covid-19 vaccine. The vax was developed by Pfizer and BioNTech. It is an RNA vaccine that is 95% effective. The shot will be available in Britain next week with 50 hospitals preparing to administer it and 800,000 doses ready to be delivered from a Pfizer production facility in Belgium. The country has ordered enough doses of the two-shot vax for 20 million people, less than one-third of the population. This is the first human coronavirus vaccine and the very first RNA vaccine.

It took only 10 months for Germany’s BioNTech and its US partner, Pfizer to develop the vaccine that was granted emergency-use authorization in the UK on Wednesday—beating the previous Western record for vaccine development by more than three years. Yet, for BioNTech’s founders, Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci, the husband-and-wife team behind the endeavor, it was the outcome of three decades of work, starting long before the coronavirus first appeared in humans last winter. It began 30 years ago in rural Germany when two young physicians, the children of Turkish migrants and freshly in love, pledged to invent a new treatment for cancer, not vaccines for a virus.

By the time the pandemic broke out, Dr. Sahin had already spent years studying how mRNA could be delivered into the body to help it defend against threats like cancer. In January, just days before the illness was first diagnosed in Europe, he designed a version of the RNA vaccine on his home computer. Sahin was born in 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 rebuild postwar Germany with foreign labor. Dr. Türeci’s father, a surgeon, came to Germany around the same time to work at a Catholic hospital. After initially considering becoming a nun, she eventually followed in her father’s footsteps and became a physician. When the two met at Homburg University in the 1990s, they shared frustration as young physicians about the dearth of options faced by cancer patients for whom chemotherapy was no longer working. The couple wrote their doctoral dissertations on experimental cancer therapies. Christoph Huber, then head of the hematology and oncology department of the Johannes‐Gutenberg University in Mainz and now a BioNTech nonexecutive director, persuaded them to join his faculty. There they began researching new treatments based on programming the body’s own immune system to defeat cancer like it does an infectious disease. Hence the carryover to using their technology to treat a real infectious disease.

In 2001, the couple set up their first company, Ganymed Pharmaceuticals GmbH, to develop an antibody treatment for cancer. Türeci was the CEO and Sahin was in charge of research. One day in 2002, they left their laboratory around lunchtime, got married and returned to work. It was a honeymoon among test tubes and incubators.

The earliest and most important backers of the couple were Andreas and Thomas Strüngmann, twin brothers and billionaire investors who poured more than $241 million into the couple’s enterprises since 2001. In 2008, Sahin and Türeci founded BioNTech to expand their research from antibody treatments into mRNA therapies. Ganymed was sold for $1.4 billion in 2016 and the couple reinvested the proceeds into BioNTech. The BioNTech team includes scientists from 60 nations, half of them women scientists.

On Saturday, Jan. 25, after reading a study Sahin set to work on his computer, designing the template for 10 possible coronavirus vaccines, one of which would become BNT162b2, the vaccine authorized in the U.K. on Wednesday. That same day, BioNTech refocused its work from cancer to combating a virus that didn’t yet have a name and hadn’t yet been diagnosed in Europe. The following Monday, Sahin reorganized his staff into seven-day shifts, asked key workers to cancel their holidays and stop using public transport to protect him from the coming pandemic that Sahin predicted. The newly dubbed Lightspeed Project would develop a vaccine in months rather than years using RNA technology platforms the company had developed to fight other diseases. It was a risky and visionary endeavor.

BioNTech already had been working with Pfizer to develop a flu vaccine based on the mRNA technology. So when Sahin needed a partner to organize clinical trials, manufacture the product, and help distribute it he approached Pfizer. In March, the two companies signed a cooperation deal, and in April, the first human trials began. Now, the second day of December, the vaccine has been approved and inoculations will begin a few days!

As an interesting aside: Ugur Sahin’s brother, Mustafa Sahin, MD was a research fellow in my cancer research laboratory at the University of Wisconsin.

And so it begins….