Turkish immigrants' children in Germany behind promising COVID-19 vaccine candidate

In a breakthrough in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, German company BioNTech and its US partner Pfizer announced on Nov. 9 that their jointly produced vaccine has proven to be 90 percent effective in preventing COVID-19 infections. The founders of BioNTech are the married scientists Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin, children of Turkish immigrants, who are now figures among the 100 richest Germans, according to weekly Welt am Sonntag.

Duvar English - Reuters

Pfizer and BioNTech announced on Nov. 9 that their experimental vaccine was more than 90 percent effective in preventing COVID-19, based on initial data from a large study.

The two companies are the first drugmakers to show successful data from a large-scale clinical trial of a coronavirus vaccine.

BioNTech was founded in 2008 by the married scientists Özlem Türeci, 53, and Uğur Şahin, 55, both the children of Turkish immigrants. The "dream team" are now figures among the 100 richest Germans, according to weekly Welt am Sonntag.

Doggedly pursuing his childhood dream of studying medicine and becoming a physician, Şahin worked at teaching hospitals in Cologne and the southwestern city of Homburg, where he met Türeci during his early academic career, Reuters said.

Türeci said in a media interview that even on the day of their wedding, both made time for lab work.

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 tumor.

Life as entrepreneurs started in 2001 when they set up Ganymed Pharmaceuticals to develop cancer-fighting antibodies, but Şahin – by then a professor at Mainz university – never gave up academic research and teaching.

They won funding from MIG AG as well as from Thomas and Andreas Struengmann, who sold their generic drugs business Hexal to Novartis in 2005.

That venture was sold to Japan’s Astellas in 2016 for up to $1.4 billion. By then, the team behind Ganymed was already busy building BioNTech, founded in 2008, to pursue a much broader range of cancer immunotherapy tools. That included mRNA, a versatile messenger substance to send genetic instructions into cells.

For MIG’s Kromayer, Türeci and Şahin are a “dream team” in that they reconciled their visions with the constraints of reality

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.

“He is a very modest and humble person. Appearances mean little to him. But he wants to create the structures that allow him to realize his visions and that’s where is aspirations are far from modest,” Theobald said.

Şahin told Reuters on Nov. 9 the read-out 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.”

Topics Coronavirus Turkey Germany COVID-19 BioNTech Uğur Şahin COVID-19 vaccine Pfizer Özlem Türeci German company BioNTech