BERLIN (AP) – The scientist who won the race to deliver the first widely used coronavirus vaccine says people can be sure the shots are safe and that the technology behind it will soon be used to fight another global scourge: cancer.
Ozlem Tureci, who co-founded the German company BioNTech with her husband, was working on a way to harness the body’s immune system to fight tumors when they learned last year of an unknown virus infecting people in China.
Over breakfast, the couple decided to apply the new technology they had been researching for two decades to the new threat, and christened the effort “Project Lightspeed.”
Within eleven months, Britain had authorized the use of the BioNTech mRNA vaccine developed with US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, followed a week later by the United States. Tens of millions of people around the world have been shot since December.
“It’s worth making bold decisions and trusting that if you have an extraordinary team, you’ll be able to solve any problems and obstacles that come your way in real time,” Tureci told The Associated Press in an interview.
Among the biggest challenges for the small Mainz-based company that had not yet managed to market a product was how to conduct large-scale clinical trials in different regions and how to increase the manufacturing process to meet demand. world.
Along with Pfizer, the company enlisted the help of Fosun Pharma in China “to get assets, capabilities and geographic footprint on board, which we didn’t have,” Tureci said.
Among the lessons she and her husband, BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin learned along with her colleagues, was “the importance of cooperation and collaboration internationally.”
Tureci, who was born in Germany to Turkish immigrants, said the company, which has staff members from 60 countries, contacted medical oversight bodies from the outset to make sure the new type of vaccine it would pass strict control of regulators.
“The process of obtaining approval for a drug or vaccine is one of the cases where many questions are asked, many experts are involved and there is an external peer review of all the data and scientific discourse,” he said. to say.
Amid a scare in Europe this week over the coronavirus shot fired by British-Swedish rival AstraZeneca, Tureci dismissed the idea that those competing to develop a vaccine have cut corners.
“There is a very rigid process and the process does not stop after a vaccine has been approved,” he said. “In fact, it continues now around the world, where regulators have used reporting systems to analyze and evaluate any observations made with our vaccines or others.”
Tureci and his colleagues have themselves received the BioNTech vaccine, he told the AP. “Yes, we have been vaccinated,” he said.
As BioNTech’s profile has grown during the pandemic, so has its value, providing funds that the company can use to achieve its original goal of developing a new tool against cancer.
Hopefully in a couple of years we will also have our (cancer) cancer vaccines in a place where we can offer them to people.
–Ozlem Tureci, co-founder of BioNTech
Vaccines developed by BioNTech-Pfizer and rival American Modern use messenger RNA (mRNA), or mRNA, to carry instructions to the human body to make proteins that prepare it to attack a specific virus. The same principle can be applied to get the immune system to take tumors.
“We have several different cancer vaccines based on mRNA,” said Tureci, who is the medical head of BioNTech.
Asked when such therapy might be available, Tureci said that “it is very difficult to predict in an innovative development. But hopefully in a couple of years we will also have our (cancer) vaccines in a place where we can offer them to people. “
For now, Tureci and Sahin are trying to make sure that the vaccines that governments have ordered are delivered and that the shots respond effectively to any new mutations in the virus.
On Friday, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier awarded the wife and husband one of the highest awards in the country, the Order of Merit, during a ceremony attended by Chancellor Angela Merkel, 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.”
Tureci said before the ceremony that getting the award was “really an honor.”
But he insisted that vaccine development was the job of many.
“This is the effort of many: our BioNTech team, all the partners involved, also governments, regulators, who worked together with a sense of urgency,” Tureci said. “As we see it, it’s a recognition of that effort and also a celebration of science.”
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