BERLIN (AP) – The scientist who won the race to deliver the first widely used coronavirus vaccine says people can be sure that the vaccines are safe and that the technology behind it will be used soon to fight another global scourge – cancer.
Ozlem Tureci, who co-founded the German company BioNTech with her husband, was working on a way to control the body’s immune system to fight tumors when they learned last year of an unknown virus that infects people in China.
During breakfast, the couple decided to apply the technology they had been researching for two decades to the new threat, calling the effort “Project Lightspeed”.
Get the daily edition of The Times of Israel by email and never miss our top news Subscribe for free
In 11 months, Britain authorized the use of the BioNTech mRNA vaccine developed with the American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, followed a week later by the United States. Tens of millions of people around the world have received the injection since December. Israel, the world leader in vaccination per capita, is overwhelmingly using Pfizer jabs.
“It is worth making bold decisions and trusting that, if you have an extraordinary team, you will be able to solve any problem and obstacle that arises in real time,” Tureci told the Associated Press in an interview.
One of the biggest challenges for the small company based in Mainz that did not yet have a product on the market was how to conduct large-scale clinical trials in different regions and how to increase the manufacturing process to meet global demand.
Together with Pfizer, the company enlisted the help of Fosun Pharma in China “to obtain assets, capabilities and a geographic footprint on board, which we did not have,” said Tureci.
Among the lessons she and her husband, BioNTech’s chief executive, Ugur Sahin, learned from their colleagues: “How cooperation and collaboration is important internationally”.
Husband and wife Ugur Sahin, second from the right, and Ozlem Tureci, second from the left, the founders of the coronavirus vaccine developer BioNTech, pose for a photo at the Axel Springer Award ceremony for the couple of researchers broadcast by Internet, Thursday, March 18, 2021. (Bernd von Jutrczenka / dpa via AP, Pool)
Tureci, who was born in Germany to Turkish immigrants, said the company, which has employees from 60 countries, has sought medical oversight bodies from the outset to ensure that the new type of vaccine would pass strict scrutiny from regulators.
“The process for approving a drug or vaccine is one in which many questions are asked, many experts are involved and there is an external peer review of all data and scientific discourse,” she said.
Amid a scare in Europe this week over the injection of coronavirus by Swedish-British rival AstraZeneca, Tureci rejected the idea that any corner was cut off by those rushing to develop a vaccine.
“There is a very strict process and the process does not stop after the vaccine is approved,” she said. “It is, in fact, continuing now throughout the world, where regulators have used reporting systems to track and evaluate any observations made with ours or other vaccines.”
Man receives Pfizer vaccine at vaccination center in Amman, Jordan, January 13, 2021 (AP Photo / Raad Adayleh)
Tureci and his colleagues received the BioNTech vaccine, she told the AP. “Yes, we were vaccinated,” she said.
As BioNTech’s profile grew during the pandemic, so did its value, providing funds the company can use to pursue its original goal of developing a new cancer tool.
Vaccines made by BioNTech-Pfizer and American rival Moderna use messenger RNA, or mRNA, to carry instructions to the human body for the production of proteins that prepare it to attack a specific virus. The same principle can be applied to make the immune system fight tumors.
“We have several cancer vaccines based on mRNA,” said Tureci, who is the medical director at BioNTech.
Asked when such therapy could be available, Tureci said, “This is very difficult to predict in innovative development. But we hope that in just a few years, we will also have our vaccines [against] cancer in a place where we can offer it to people. “
Vials of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv, December 20, 2020. (AP Photo / Ariel Schalit)
For now, Tureci and Sahin are trying to ensure that the vaccines that governments have ordered are delivered and that the vaccines respond effectively to any new mutations in the virus.
On Friday, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier awarded his wife and husband one of the country’s greatest decorations, the Order of Merit, during a ceremony attended by Chancellor Angela Merkel, herself a trained scientist.
“You started with a drug to treat cancer in a single individual,” Steinmeier told the couple. “And today we have a vaccine for all of humanity.”
Ozlem Tureci, 3rd on the left, and her husband Ugur Sahin, 2nd on the right, both scientists and founders of BioNTech, pose with their orders after receiving the Federal Cross of Merit from German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, 2nd on the left, in 19 March, 2021 at the presidential palace Bellevue in Berlin, Germany (Odd Andersen / Pool Photo via AP)
Tureci said before the ceremony that receiving the award was “indeed an honor”.
But she insisted that developing the vaccine was the work of many.
“It is the effort of many: our team at BioNTech, all the partners involved, including governments, regulatory authorities, who have worked together with a sense of urgency,” said Tureci. “In our view, this is an acknowledgment of that effort and also a celebration of science.”
