The scientist who made the first widely used COVID-19 vaccine ensures that the shots are safe and that the technology behind it will be used to fight cancer.
Ozlem Tureci, who co-founded the small, German-based company BioNTech with her husband, was working on a solution to harness the body’s immune system to fight tumors when they found out about the coronavirus infecting people in China.
The duo decided to apply the technology they’d been working on for twenty years to the new threat, calling the effort “Project Lightspeed.”
Within only eleven months, Britain had authorized the use of the vaccine BioNTech developed with U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. Since December, tens of millions of people worldwide have already received the shot.
Tureci, who is also BioNTech’s chief medical officer, said, “It pays off to make bold decisions and to trust that if you have an extraordinary team, you will be able to solve any problem and obstacle which comes your way in real time.”
The Mainz-based company’s most significant challenge for getting a product to market was how to scale up the manufacturing process to be able to meet global demand and roll out large-scale clinical trials across several regions.
Besides Pfizer, the company recruited the help of China’s Fosun Pharma “to get assets, capabilities and geographical footprint on board, which we did not have,” Tureci explained.
Tureci, her husband (BioNTech chief executive Ugur Sahin), and their colleagues learned along the way “how important cooperation and collaboration is internationally.” The company, which has employees from 60 countries, has worked with medical oversight bodies from the beginning to ensure that the new vaccine would pass the rigorous inspection of regulators.
She explained, “The process of getting medicine or a vaccine approved is one where many questions are asked, many experts are involved, and there is an external peer review of all the data and scientific discourse.”
Amid a worldwide scare over the coronavirus shot created by rival AstraZeneca, Tureci dismissed the notion that any shortcuts were made by those racing to develop an effective vaccine. “There is a very rigid process in place, and the process does not stop after a vaccine has been approved. It is, in fact, continuing now all around the world, where regulators have used reporting systems to screen and to assess any observations made with our or other vaccines,” she added.
Tureci confirmed that she, Sahin, and her colleagues had all received the BioNTech vaccine. “Yes, we have been vaccinated,” she said.
BioNTech’s growing profile amid the pandemic has increased its value, providing funds the company can use to continue its original goal of producing a new cancer-fighting tool.
BioNTech-Pfizer’s vaccine uses messenger RNA (mRNA) to deliver instructions into the human body for producing proteins that attack a specific virus. The same principle can also be applied used to get the immune system to fight tumors. “We have several different cancer vaccines based on mRNA,” added Tureci. That prediction is now playing out, with a personalized mRNA melanoma vaccine succeeding in a 1,000-patient trial and more therapeutic cancer vaccines in testing.
When Tureci was asked the available date for such therapy, she said, “We expect that within only a couple of years, we will also have our vaccines against cancer at a place where we can offer them to people.”
The couple is now focused on ensuring that the vaccines ordered by governments are delivered and that the shots respond efficiently to any new mutation in the virus.
On March 19, 2021, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier awarded Tureci and her husband the Order of Merit (one of Germany’s highest decorations) during a ceremony attended by Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is also a trained scientist. “You began with a drug to treat cancer in a single individual. And today, we have a vaccine for all of humanity,” Steinmeier proudly told the duo.
Tureci was honored to receive the award but humbly highlighted that developing the vaccine was the work of a collaboration of many. “It’s about the effort of many: our team at BioNTech, all the partners who were involved, also governments, regulatory authorities, which worked together with a sense of urgency,” Tureci explained.
Tureci sees the award as an acknowledgment of this collaborative effort and “a celebration of science.”
