Pfizer anti Covid vaccine, who are the leaders and founders of the German Biontech
Numbers, names and curiosities about the German company Biontech which is collaborating with Pfizer in the experimentation of the anti Covid vaccine. The article by Tino Oldani for Italy Today
Pfizer here, Pfizer there: for days there has been a lot of talk about the anti-Covid-19 vaccine of the American pharmaceutical group, the first with an efficacy of 90%, according to the tests of phase three. The announcement had a worldwide impact and created great expectations, as the pandemic has already affected millions of people around the world. And since the Pfizer group is based in the US, journalists and TV have talked about the great success of American scientific research. The merit of the discovery, on the other hand, goes to a German couple of Turkish origin, husband and wife who have lived for years in Mainz, Germany, where they founded a pharmaceutical research company, BioNTech, to which Pfizer had teamed up to find the new vaccine. Mission that BioNTech has successfully accomplished, thanks to only German funds, used very well: 375 million euros made available by the government of Angela Merkel.
The story of the Turkish-German couple is that of two very good scientists in their field, even if completely unknown until yesterday. He is Ugur Sahin, 53, born in Alexandretta, a city in southern Turkey, who emigrated to Germany in the late seventies with his family in search of better luck. The father worked in a Ford car factory in Cologne and did everything to support the studies of his son, who wanted to become a doctor, and he succeeded. After graduation, Ugur Sahin worked as a hospital doctor in Cologne, then moved to Homburg, where he met his future wife, Ozlem Tureci, also of Turkish origin, the daughter of a doctor and a medical graduate, specializing in immunology. .
Both, Sahin and Tureci, have a strong vocation for research, so much so that they spent a few hours in their laboratory even on their wedding day in 2002. The year before they had founded a biotechnology company, Ganymed Pharmaceuticals, engaged in the research of a new generation of cancer drugs, based on the idea of harnessing the immune system to induce it to fight cancer cells. The company is successful and in 2016 it was purchased for 1.4 billion dollars by the Japanese multinational drug company Astellas.
Not for this Sahin and Tureci remain unemployed. A few years earlier they had founded another research company, BioNTech, which over the years has specialized in the production of synthetic forms of a particular molecule, known as mRNA, an acronym for messenger RNA. And the latter, I summarize with unscientific but understandable terms, is the molecule that codes and carries the instructions contained in the DNA to produce proteins. Basically, BioNTech creates in the laboratory the synthetic mRNA cells that contain the instructions to produce specific proteins, typical of some tumors or produced by viruses and bacteria, in order to counteract their pathologies.
According to what the Turkish-German couple told a Reuters journalist, who was the first to unveil its role in the discovery of the new vaccine, when, last January, the first information on the Coronavirus in China comes out, Sahin and his wife Tureci plan to use the knowledge acquired on mRNA to produce a new generation vaccine in order to fight Covid-19. Without wasting time, they engage 500 employees of their company in this research, to which they assign the name of "Lightspeed", speed of light, with the ambition to be on the market by the end of the year. A huge and expensive effort. But the couple is esteemed in the world of research, and the search for help is successful. In March, BioNTech signed an agreement with Pfizer for an experimental vaccine, an agreement to which the Chinese company Fosum Pharmaceuticals also joins. And Merkel puts in 375 million euros.
In just seven months, from March to the end of October, BioNTech develops the new vaccine and conducts the planned three phases of human trials, of which the third is close to completion, with 90% success. The vaccine, as expected, contains mRNA sequences with instructions to make some Coronavirus-specific proteins, but harmless if the virus is not there. If it is present, the immune system learns to recognize and counter them. If all goes well, Pfizer will have the task of producing and distributing billions of doses around the world, based on long-term contracts with many states. A colossal deal.
Obviously also Sahin and Tureci, successful entrepreneurs as well as Nobel scientists, will make large profits, becoming even richer. According to a ranking drawn up by the weekly Welt am Sontag, the couple is already among the top 100 richest people in Germany. And thanks to Pfizer's announcement of the vaccine, their company's value jumped from $ 4.6 billion last year to $ 21 billion at the end of last week, while BioNTech stock went up 14 per one hundred, a first tear in view of future increases.
(extract from an article published in Italia Oggi; here the full version )
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/vaccino-pfizer-anti-covid-chi-sono-vertici-e-fondatori-della-tedesca-biontech/ on Sun, 15 Nov 2020 15:51:49 +0000.