The decision to pivot an entire company to focus on the coronavirus is obvious a posteriori, at least for Moderna, BioNTech and Pfizer, who were successful beyond anyone’s expectations and will get billions of dollars in sales from the their vaccines only this year.
It was not such a clear decision in the first months of 2020, although that was when Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel and BioNTech chief Ugur Sahin began turning their ships, they told CNBC in interviews for a documentary released Friday about the career vaccine.
“The night China closed Wuhan, I said,‘ When was the last time I found out that a city was closed due to an infectious disease? Bancel recalled. “And what comes to my mind is: what do the Chinese know that we don’t know?”
Bancel said he woke up sweating at 4 in the morning and realized, “Wow, there will be a pandemic like in 1918.”
For Sahin, he was reading a paper in Lancet magazine in late January describing the outbreak in China.
“I did several calculations, quick calculations, and I realized it had already spread,” Sahin said. “And it was clear it was too late to stop the disease.”
But he was convinced that BioNTech, which focused primarily on personalized cancer therapies, could do something about it. His company contacted Pfizer, he said, proposing to work on a vaccine against the new coronavirus using the same technology, messenger RNA, in which they had already partnered to try to fight the flu.
“We had the first contact a few days after starting the project,” Sahin said. “At the time, Pfizer wasn’t interested yet.”
Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, confirmed Sahin’s account and said that during the first months of 2020 he focused on maintaining the company’s operations in China. But by the end of February, he said, he had decided that Pfizer needed to work on a treatment and a vaccine.
“What’s the best approach?” Bourla said he asked his team.
Kathrin Jansen, head of vaccine research and development at Pfizer, said they evaluated all existing technologies, including protein-based vaccines and vaccines that use viral vectors.
“They all have too few advantages and too many disadvantages,” he said.
But messenger RNA was a risk; it had never been used before as a vaccine or approved drug.
“I struggled a bit with the decision,” Bourla said. But after another meeting with the team, “they convinced me.”
That was when Sahin called a second time. The outbreak, by this time, was already in New York, he said. Arriving at Jansen, he described the work BioNTech already had underway and asked if Pfizer would like to work together.
“And I said, absolutely,” Jansen recalled. “Let’s talk about it.”
At Moderna, it was never asked that messenger RNA would be the way forward; this was the technology around which the company was founded in 2010. But that didn’t mean there were no questions asked.
“Even entering March, there were voices saying that vaccines were false hopes,” recalled Dr. Stephen Hoge, president of Moderna. “For a period of time it seemed to us that we needed to defend even the idea of trying.”
“When we were thinking about how we get into Phase 1, what it looks like to prepare for a pandemic, the eyes of the world felt like they were looking at Modern as this biotechnology …‘ what are they trying to do? ’” Said Hamilton Bennett, senior director of access and vaccine associations of Moderna.
“It was only when we made the transition in that March notification from the WHO that it was a global pandemic, it’s an emergency, that I think people started to realize that what we’re doing isn’t playing in a sandbox trying to prove our technology, ”Bennett said. “We are developing a vaccine that will stop the pandemic.”
The companies were successful in what became one of the largest medical careers in history. Here, they remember how it happened.