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Image posted, © BIONTECH SE 2020
Auger Shaheen and his wife Ozlem Toragi
A team made up of a German couple of Turkish descent is at the forefront of the race to launch an anti-Coronavirus vaccine, which will of course be an extraordinary achievement.
Oger Sahin, 55, born in Turkey, is the CEO of German biotech company Biontech. It was founded with his wife, his colleague Ozlem, 53, and his former professor, Professor Christoph Huber, an Austrian cancer expert.
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Biontech and its US partner, Pfizer, announced that their vaccine can protect more than 90% of people from contracting Covid-19, according to preliminary results from phase three trials.
This vaccine is one of 11 vaccines that are in the final stages of trials in various parts of the world, which are being carried out by pharmaceutical companies and other competing laboratories.
The world has not seen such rapid progress toward vaccine development before, as research and experiments typically take seven to eight years.
The Covid team at Biontech has earned the nickname “Project Speed of Light”.
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How will it work?
Professor Shaheen and Dr. Toraji are experts in immunotherapy. Their efforts have in the past focused on cancer patients, as they used RNA molecules to stimulate the production of specific proteins in cells, which could then be used to train the immune system to attack cancer cells.
Professor Shaheen discovered that the role that RNA plays in sending genetic instructions to cells can be modified for use in the fight against the Corona virus.
The idea is to trick the immune system with viral proteins, so that the antibodies can attack the virus.
And when news of the severity of the coronavirus outbreak arrived last January, based on data from the epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan, China, Biontec was in a good position, having started cooperating with Pfizer in 2018 to develop vaccines against the virus. RNA-based influenza.
On Monday, Biontec reported that the vaccine was more than 90% effective within a week after receiving its second dose. Protection against the virus can be achieved 28 days after receiving the first dose of the vaccine. Of the 43,538 participants in the trial, 94 people were confirmed to have COVID-19.
Image posted, AFP
Biontech headquarters in Mainz, Germany
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Professor Shaheen and Dr. Toraji founded Biontech in Mainz, West Germany, in 2008.
They were both born to Turkish immigrant parents. Auger Shaheen was four years old when he moved with his mother to Germany to join his father, who worked in a Ford factory in Cologne.
Auger studied medicine at the University of Cologne and says he used to stay in the lab late into the night before riding his bike home. He still rides his bike to work.
“It has never changed, it is still modest, elegant and elegant,” says Matthias Kermayers, a senior investor at MIG AG, who has bought shares of Biontec since its inception.
Before the outbreak of the Corona epidemic, Biontech conducted research to develop individual immune-based cancer treatments, but none of these drugs have reached the approval stage yet.
As for Ozlem, she was influenced by her father, who was a doctor, and had his own clinic within his home.
She was quoted as saying, “I couldn’t imagine myself in any other profession when I was young.”
The market value of his Nasdaq-listed company rose to $ 21 billion, after it was estimated at $ 4.6 billion a year ago.
The CEO, Professor Shaheen, who owns 18% of the company, is one of the ten richest people in Germany. And his wife holds the position of medical director of the company.
They were married in 2002 when Professor Shaheen was working at the Mainz University Medical Center.
Even on their wedding day, Professor Shaheen spent some time inside the lab, and he still teaches at the university to this day.
The couple became biotech entrepreneurs in 2001 and founded the pharmaceutical company Ganymede to develop immunotherapy treatments for cancer before selling them in 2016 for 422 million euros.
Biontech now employs more than 1,300 people from more than 60 countries, and more than half of them are women, according to Deutsche Welle.
The professor had realized the rate at which the Corona virus was spreading after reading about it in the Lancet medical journal last January, so he assigned more than 400 employees the task of developing a vaccine.
“The value of my stock does not matter to me. We wanted to build a company that would match the biotech giants like Amgen and Genentech. We want to create long-term value. That is what matters to me,” he told German news site Vierschafts Fuchi .
