Ugur Sahin, CEO and co-founder of the German biotechnology company BioNTech. (ARCHIVE)
Frankfurt:
The positive data on the COVID-19 vaccine from BioNTech and its American partner Pfizer Inc is an unlikely success for the married couple behind the German biotech company, which has dedicated their lives to harnessing the immune system against cancer. Pfizer said Monday that its experimental vaccine was more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 based on initial data from a large study.
Pfizer and BioNTech are the first drug makers to show successful data from a large-scale clinical trial of a coronavirus vaccine. The companies said they have found no serious security issues so far and hope to apply for emergency use authorization from the United States later this month.
From humble roots as the son of a Turkish immigrant working at a Ford factory in Cologne, BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin, 55, is now among the 100 richest Germans, along with his wife and board member. directive Oezlem Tuereci, 53, according to the weekly. Welt am Sonntag.
The market value of the Nasdaq-listed BioNTech, which the pair co-founded, had soared to $ 21 billion as of Friday’s close from $ 4.6 billion a year ago, and the company is poised to play a major role in the mass immunization against coronavirus.
“Despite his accomplishments, he never stopped being incredibly humble and personable,” said Matthias Kromayer, a board member at venture capital firm MIG AG, whose funds have supported BioNTech since its inception in 2008.
He added that Sahin used to go to business meetings wearing jeans and carrying his bicycle helmet and backpack with him.
Doggedly pursuing his childhood dream of studying medicine and becoming a doctor, Sahin worked in university hospitals in Cologne and in the southwestern city of Homburg, where he met Tuereci during his early academic career.
Medical research and oncology became a shared passion.
Tuereci, the daughter of a Turkish doctor who had emigrated to Germany, said in a media interview that even on their wedding day, they both made time for laboratory work.
Together they focused 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 an entrepreneur began in 2001 when they established Ganymed Pharmaceuticals to develop cancer-fighting antibodies, but Sahin, by then a professor at the University of Mainz, never gave up academic research and teaching.
They obtained funding from MIG AG, as well as Thomas and Andreas Struengmann, who sold their Hexal generic drug business to Novartis in 2005.
That company 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 for sending genetic instructions to cells.
DREAM TEAM
For MIG’s Kromayer, Tuereci and Sahin are a “dream team” in the sense that they reconciled their visions with the limitations of reality.
The BioNTech story took a turn when Sahin came across a scientific paper about a new coronavirus outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan in January and was surprised by how small the step was from cancer mRNA drugs to viral vaccines. based on mRNA.
BioNTech quickly assigned around 500 employees to project the “speed of light” to work on various possible compounds, winning pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and Chinese pharmacist Fosun as partners in March.
Matthias Theobald, a fellow oncology professor at the University of Mainz who has worked with Sahin for 20 years, said his tendency to understatement hides 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 is where his aspirations are far from being modest,” said Theobald.
Sahin told Reuters on Monday that the reading amounted to an “extraordinary success rate” but that he did not know at the beginning of the year how difficult the task would be overall.
“It’s certainly not something that can be easily expressed as a serious scientist, but it was within the realm of possibility from the beginning.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is posted from a syndicated channel.)
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