How an immigrant couple in Germany developed leading vaccine against COVID-19

Two years in the past, Dr. Ugur Sahin took the stage at a convention in Berlin and made a daring prediction. Chatting with a roomful of infectious illness consultants, he mentioned his firm may have the ability to use its so-called messenger RNA expertise to quickly develop a vaccine within the occasion of a world pandemic.

On the time, Sahin and his firm, BioNTech, have been little identified exterior the small world of European biotechnology startups. BioNTech, which Sahin based along with his spouse, Dr. Özlem Türeci, was principally centered on most cancers therapies. It had by no means introduced a product to market. COVID-19 didn’t but exist.

However his phrases proved prophetic.

On Monday, BioNTech and Pfizer introduced {that a} vaccine for the coronavirus developed by Sahin and his staff was greater than 90 % efficient in stopping the illness amongst trial volunteers who had no proof of getting beforehand been contaminated. The beautiful outcomes vaulted BioNTech and Pfizer to the entrance of the race to discover a treatment for a illness that has killed greater than 1.2 million folks worldwide.

“It might be the start of the top of the COVID period,” Sahin mentioned in an interview Tuesday.

BioNTech started work on the vaccine in January, after Sahin learn an article within the medical journal The Lancet that left him satisfied that the coronavirus , on the time spreading rapidly in components of China, would explode right into a full-blown pandemic. Scientists on the firm, primarily based in Mainz, Germany, canceled holidays and set to work on what they known as Challenge Lightspeed.

“There usually are not too many corporations on the planet which have the capability and the competence to do it so quick as we will do it,” Sahin mentioned in an interview final month. “So it felt not like a possibility, however an obligation to do it, as a result of I spotted we might be among the many first arising with a vaccine.”

After BioNTech had recognized a number of promising vaccine candidates, Sahin concluded that the corporate would wish assist to quickly check them, win approval from regulators and produce one of the best candidate to market. BioNTech and Pfizer had been working collectively on a flu vaccine since 2018, and in March, they agreed to collaborate on a coronavirus vaccine.

Since then, Sahin, who’s Turkish, has developed a friendship with Albert Bourla, the Greek chief govt of Pfizer. The pair mentioned in latest interviews that they’d bonded over their shared backgrounds as scientists and immigrants.

“We realized that he’s from Greece, and that I’m from Turkey,” Sahin mentioned, with out mentioning their native international locations’ long-running antagonism. “It was very private from the very starting.”

Sahin, 55, was born in Iskenderun, Turkey. When he was 4, his household moved to Cologne, Germany, the place his mother and father labored at a Ford manufacturing facility. He grew up eager to be a physician, and have become a doctor on the College of Cologne. In 1993, he earned a doctorate from the college for his work on immunotherapy in tumor cells.

Early in his profession, he met Türeci. She had early hopes to change into a nun and in the end wound up learning drugs. Türeci, now 53 and the chief medical officer of BioNTech, was born in Germany, the daughter of a Turkish doctor who immigrated from Istanbul. On the day they have been married, Sahin and Türeci returned to the lab after the ceremony.

The couple have been initially centered on analysis and educating, together with on the College of Zurich, the place Sahin labored within the lab of Rolf Zinkernagel, who gained the 1996 Nobel Prize in drugs.

In 2001, Sahin and Türeci based Ganymed Prescribed drugs, which developed medication to deal with most cancers utilizing monoclonal antibodies.

After a number of years they based BioNTech as effectively, trying to make use of a wider vary of applied sciences, together with messenger RNA, to deal with most cancers. “We wish to construct a big European pharmaceutical firm,” Sahin mentioned in an interview with the Wiesbaden Courier, a neighborhood paper.

Even earlier than the pandemic, BioNTech was gaining momentum. The corporate raised tons of of thousands and thousands of {dollars} and now has greater than 1,800 folks on employees, with workplaces in Berlin, different German cities and Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2018, it started its partnership with Pfizer. Final 12 months, the Invoice & Melinda Gates Basis invested $55 million to fund its work treating HIV and tuberculosis. Additionally in 2019, Sahin was awarded the Mustafa Prize, a biennial Iranian prize for Muslims in science and expertise.

Sahin and Türeci bought Ganymed for $1.4 billion in 2016. Final 12 months, BioNTech bought shares to the general public; in latest months, its market worth has soared previous $21 billion, making the couple among the many richest in Germany.

The 2 billionaires reside with their teenage daughter in a modest house close to their workplace. They experience bicycles to work. They don’t personal a automobile.

“Ugur is a really, very distinctive particular person,” Bourla, Pfizer’s chief govt, mentioned within the interview final month. “He cares solely about science. Discussing enterprise isn’t his cup of tea. He doesn’t prefer it in any respect. He’s a scientist and a person of ideas. I belief him 100%.”

In Germany, the place immigration continues to be a fractious situation, the success of two scientists of Turkish descent was trigger for celebration.

“With this couple, Germany has a shining instance of profitable integration,” wrote the conservative-business web site Focus.

A member of Parliament, Johannes Vogel, wrote on Twitter that if it was as much as the far-right Various for Germany social gathering, “there could be no #BioNTech of Germany with Özlem Türeci & Ugur Sahin on the high.”

“If it have been as much as critics of capitalism and globalization,” he added, “there could be no cooperation with Pfizer. However that makes us robust: immigration nation, market financial system & open society!”

Sahin has had little time for politics this 12 months.

BioNTech has been so busy creating a vaccine that the corporate has not finalized the monetary particulars of its partnership settlement with Pfizer.

“Belief and private relationship is so vital in such enterprise, as a result of the whole lot goes so quick,” Sahin mentioned. “We nonetheless have a time period sheet and never but a remaining contract on many issues.”

Sahin mentioned he and Türeci realized about efficacy information on Sunday evening and marked the second by brewing Turkish tea at residence. “We celebrated, after all,” he mentioned. “It was a reduction.”

David Gelles c.2020 The New York Occasions Firm