BERLIN (AP) – The scientist who won the race to deliver the first widely used coronavirus vaccine says people can rest assured the shots are safe, and the technology behind it will soon be used to target another global scourge. fight: cancer.
Ozlem Tureci, who founded the German company BioNTech with her husband, was working on a way to use the body’s immune system to target tumors when they learned last year that an unknown virus is infecting people in China.
Over breakfast, the couple decided to apply the technology they had been researching for two decades to the new threat, dubbed ‘Project Lightspeed’.
Within 11 months, Great Britain had authorized the use of the mRNA vaccine that BioNTech had developed together with the American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, followed a week later by the United States. Since December, tens of millions of people around the world have received the shot.
“It pays to make bold decisions and trust that if you have an extraordinary team, you can solve every problem and obstacle you encounter in real time,” Tureci told The Associated Press in an interview.
One of the biggest challenges for the small Mainz-based company that had yet to bring a product to market was conducting large-scale clinical trials in different regions and scaling the manufacturing process to meet global demand.
Together with Pfizer, the company enlisted the help of Fosun Pharma in China “to get assets, capabilities and geographic footprint on board that we did not have,” said Tureci.
One of the lessons she and her husband, BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin, and their colleagues learned, was “the importance of collaboration and collaboration internationally.”
Tureci, who was born in Germany to Turkish immigrants, said the company, which has staff from 60 countries, has been in contact with medical regulators from the outset to ensure that the new type of vaccine would meet strict regulators’ scrutiny. .
“The process of getting a drug or a vaccine approved is one that involves many questions, involves many experts, and there is external peer review of all the data and scientific discourse,” she said.
Amid a scare in Europe this week over the coronavirus shot taken by British-Swedish rival AstraZeneca, Tureci dismissed the idea that those racing to develop a vaccine were all over the road.
“There is a very rigid process and the process doesn’t stop after a vaccine is approved,” she said. “In fact, it is now continuing around the world where regulators have used reporting systems to screen and assess any sightings with our or other vaccines.”
Tureci and her colleagues have all received the BioNTech vaccine themselves, she told the AP. “Yes, we have been vaccinated,” she said.
As BioNTech’s profile has grown during the pandemic, so has its value as it provides the resources the company can use to pursue its original goal of developing a new cancer drug.
We expect that within a few years we will also have our vaccines (against) cancer in a place where we can offer them to people.
–Ozlem Tureci, Co-Founder of BioNTech
The vaccines made by BioNTech-Pfizer and US rival Moderna use messenger RNA, or mRNA, to deliver instructions into the human body to make proteins that prepare it to attack a specific virus. The same principle can be applied to make the immune system accept tumors.
“We have several mRNA-based cancer vaccines,” said Tureci, BioNTech’s Chief Medical Officer.
When asked when such a therapy might be available, Tureci said: “It’s very difficult to predict in innovative development. But we expect that within a few years we will also have our vaccines (against) cancer in a place where we can offer them. to people. “
For now, Tureci and Sahin are trying to ensure that the vaccines that governments have ordered are delivered and that the shots respond effectively to any new mutation in the virus.
On Friday, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier awarded the wife and husband one of the country’s highest honors, the Order of Merit, in a ceremony attended by Chancellor Angela Merkel, herself a trained scientist.
“You started on a drug to treat cancer in one person,” Steinmeier told the couple. “And today we have a vaccine for all of humanity.”
Tureci said prior to the ceremony that receiving the award was “indeed an honor.”
But she insisted that developing the vaccine was the work of many.
“It’s about the effort of many: our team at BioNTech, all the partners involved, including governments, regulators, who worked together with a sense of urgency,” said Tureci. “The way we see it, this is a recognition of this effort and also a celebration of science.”
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