German couple of Turkish origin get the vaccine, which was placed by a Hungarian biologist

• Optimistic expectations are also exceeded by the clinical results of a joint vaccine between the German BioNTech and the American Pfizer.
• They took the lead in the race, and that’s promising for the other vaccines too.
• BioNTech was founded 12 years ago by a Turkish couple, Ugur Sahin and Özlem Tureci.
• They are also used by biologist Katalin Karikó, one of the creators of the mRNA technology that forms the basis of the vaccine. Decades ago, he left Hungary due to a downsizing.

Speed ​​of light.A German company called BioNTech launched its vaccine development project under this name in mid-January. They were moving very fast, so fast that by the end of October, Spiegel had already written about it: almost 600 years after Gutenberg’s printing press, world history was being written again in Mainz. News broke Monday that BioNTech and US Pfizer’s vaccination against the coronavirus appears to be 90 percent effective.

In the third phase of clinical trials, tens of thousands of test subjects are involved in the development of each new vaccine, only those who have not yet received the virus, so their bodies have not produced antibodies. Some of them receive the vaccine (in this case two injections, three weeks apart), while the others receive placebo. Basically, even if no more than half of the former get the infection and show symptoms as among the members of the placebo group, it is considered quite effective.

Compared to 50 percent, 90 percent is a very good result, beating the most optimistic expectations, but the study is not over, the tests will continue, so the proportion may change. Approval of the vaccine in the United States is scheduled to begin at the end of the month, the first of 180 vaccine projects in the world to jump the bar.

BioNTech’s five-story headquarters in the center of Mainz, at a promising address in Gold Mine (In Gold Mine 12) located. Anyone who goes to the company’s co-founder, Ugur Sahin, for an interview is obliged to participate in an FFP2 mask, on the one hand, and to agree not to describe exactly where his office is located in the building.

Sahin was born in Turkey in 1966 but did not live there for long. At the age of four, his mother took him with him to Cologne, after his father, who was an employee of the Ford automobile factory. After high school, he went to medical school and became interested in immunotherapies, which played an important role in his later career and even in the development of a coronavirus vaccine.

At the age of twenty, he was working in a laboratory next to the university, often overnight, he recalled in a Deutsche Welle article. After graduating, even at dawn, he returned home. He has been riding his bike ever since.

He graduated in 1992, worked as a doctor in Cologne for a time, then went to Saarland University, where he met his later wife, Özlem Türec, who is now known as one of the pioneers of immunotherapy for cancer treatment. Unlike her husband, she was born in Germany and her father is a doctor of Istanbul descent.

They got married in 2002, Sahin was already working in Mainz at that time. On the wedding day, they both jumped into the lab a bit.

They build giant companies

Their first joint venture, Ganymed, ran for fifteen years and BioNTech was founded in 2008, both with the goal of fighting cancer through immunotherapy.

They assumed that surgery and chemotherapy could not be considered universal cures because there are no two cancer patients whose genetic changes in their bodies occur in exactly the same way. Instead, they began working on solutions that could harness the body’s natural defenses to help heal.

Sahin and Türeci were never enterprising, they persisted in research throughout, but they were also successful in raising funds. Ganymed’s early investors included, for example, the founders of the giant Hexal, Andreas and Thomas Strüngmann, who also have significant stakes in BioNTech.

Ganymed was sold to Astellas of Japan in 2016 for $ 1.4 billion, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation entered BioNTech for $ 55 million last August. The company now employs 1,300 people, more than 50 percent women, from a total of 60 countries, and it also appeared on the US stock exchange in October.

As CEO, Sahin owns 18 percent of the shares in BioNTech, making him one of the 100 richest Germans today. Türeci participates in the management of the company as a member of the management and as a reference doctor.

It’s different now

Of the board members, Sahin is the only one with an office at the Mainz headquarters. He is up-to-date as a company leader on the latest research findings, reads studies in his spare time, teaches oncology at university, and also deals with doctoral students.

Sean Marett, BioNTech’s head of sales, said they would not have been able to respond as quickly to the challenges posed by the epidemic. Sahin first read a scientific publication in January about a new coronavirus that had emerged in Wuhan. An article in The Lancet showed how the infection spread in a family of six, but didn’t really look at the possibility that it could be a global epidemic.

A few days later, he sent an email to the board members warning that there would be problems. “Those who have already had experience with epidemics have said that as it comes, it will go away. I said no, now it’s different, ”he told the Financial Times in March.

Few thought it was possible to meet Sahin’s tight schedule, who scheduled clinical trials to begin in the spring and finished vaccine production for December. The coronavirus didn’t even show up in Germany when the Paul Ehrlich Institute, which is charged with approving new drugs and vaccines, agreed to the plan.

BioNTech researchers have gained a great deal of experience testing new technologies in recent years, but they have never developed a new cure from scratch, much less participated in mass production. That’s why Pfizer in the US participated, which has pledged to produce 1.5 billion doses of the new vaccine by the end of 2021. Also, the first millions have already been earned, assuming that if something goes wrong, they can say goodbye to your money.

How could they be so fast?

First, as in other vaccine projects, the first and second phases of the clinical trial were conducted partly in parallel. At that time, the vaccine is not being tested in tens of thousands, only in a few hundred people. They are looking at how many micrograms it is worth injecting so that it remains effective but does not cause more serious side effects. They divide people into different groups, for example by age, and look to see if the old and the young produce different immune responses.

These studies were also conducted in Germany and the United States, with the first encouraging results arriving in mid-July. This was followed by a third phase involving tens of thousands of German, American and Argentine test subjects. They will be monitoring their condition for a long time, and by the time they are expected to begin licensing in late November, 50 percent of people will have two months of information about what happened to them after they were given the vaccine.

Technology itself has sped up the process, at least in the early stages. BioNTech and Pfizer’s vaccine is an mRNA-based vaccine that does not kill or attenuate a virus, it is just a key part of the inheritance of the virus. That is, it cannot cause an infection, but it may be enough to provoke an immune response. Many hope that, compared to other common solutions, this spells the future of vaccines.

The foundations of the technology were laid by a Hungarian biologist, Katalin Karikó, along with immunologist Drew Weismann in Pennsylvania, as recalled by the G7 in the spring.Karikó, who is currently investigating the therapeutic possibilities of mRNA as an employee of BioNTech, later gave an interview to the newspaper. It turned out that in 1985 he had to leave Szeged due to downsizing, so he moved to Philadelphia and then Germany in later years.

“Based on previous coronavirus epidemics in SARS and MERS, we concluded that it is necessary to develop a vaccine for the spike protein on the surface of the virus, as this is the protein that carries the virus into the cell. With an mRNA-based vaccine, our body produces a virus spike protein encoded by the mRNA that leaves the cell. So the rest of the virus is not there, just a surface protein important for immunity, which is not dangerous in itself. The body identifies it as foreign and responds by producing the antibody. Finally, when the virus enters the body, it is ready for it, recognizing it and neutralizing it based on the protein ”, he explained to the G7.

The 90 percent result from the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine suggests that Moderna and Sanofi, which also run on mRNA technology, could also be successful, Anthony Fauci, head of the US Epidemiological Authority, told Statnews.

There is reason to hope that we will have more successful vaccines against the coronavirus.Experts are confident that this can also convince those who would not give it to you anyway. However, it will only be possible to know in months how long the vaccine will provide protection and if it will need to be re-administered, just like the flu vaccine.

If it proves to be definitely effective and goes through the permitting process, not all the question marks will go away. It can be difficult to distribute that the vaccine must be stored at minus 70 degrees, unlike, for example, the vaccine developed by Moderna, for which minus 20 degrees is sufficient. According to Statnews, all companies are working on the solution.