MEET THE TURKISH-GERMAN ‘DREAM TEAM’ COUPLE BEHIND PFIZER’S COVID-19 VACCINE

Tue 10 October 2020:

From humble roots as the son of a Turkish immigrant, BioNTech Chief Executive Ugur Sahin, 55, now figures among the 100 richest Germans, together with his wife and fellow board member Oezlem Tuereci, 53.

US President-elect Joe Biden Monday hailed as a cause for “hope” the news that a Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech was 90% effective — but warned of a long battle still ahead.

“I congratulate the brilliant women and men who helped produce this breakthrough and to give us such cause for hope,” Biden said in a statement, adding that he received advance notice of the announcement on Sunday night.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also welcomed the news from pharmaceutical company Pfizer that its potential vaccine showed better than 90% efficacy in Phase 3 tests.

Speaking to reporters in London, Johnson said the data released Monday by Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, indicated the vaccine is safe, but the findings must be peer reviewed.

Earlier today, Pfizer and BioNTech announced their Covid-19 vaccine candidate, BNT162b2, has prevented more than 90% of infections in a study of tens of thousands of volunteers in Phase 3 trials, the most encouraging scientific advance so far in the battle against the coronavirus.

The two companies became the first drugmakers to release successful trial data.

Monday’s milestone of interim results showing 90% efficacy is a triumph for Pfizer’s and BioNTech’s scientific method. Their vaccine pioneers an entirely new technology that involves injecting part of the virus’s genetic code in order to train the immune system.

In a country where a debate about the willingness of German citizens with Turkish roots to integrate into public life has never been far from the headlines for the last decade, the story of BioNTech’s founders is also salient.

Türeci and Sahin are children of Turkish Gastarbeiter or “guest workers” who came to Germany in the late 1960s. Sahin was born in southern Turkey but moved to Cologne when he was four. Türeci, the company’s chief medical officer, was born in Lower Saxony.

The couple, who hold German citizenship and have a teenage daughter, met at Saarland University in Homburg and have been married since 2002. In an interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung, Türeci said she and her husband started their wedding day in lab coats and resumed their research after a brief dash to the registry office.

From humble roots as the son of a Turkish immigrant working at a Ford factory in Cologne, BioNTech Chief Executive Ugur Sahin, 55, now figures among the 100 richest Germans, together with his wife and fellow board member Oezlem Tuereci, 53, according to weekly Welt am Sonntag.

The market value of Nasdaq-listed BioNTech, which the pair co-founded, had ballooned to $21 billion as of Friday’s close from $4.6 billion a year ago, with the firm set to play a major role in mass immunisation against the coronavirus.

“Despite his achievements, he never changed from being incredibly humble and personable,” said Matthias Kromayer, board member of venture capital firm MIG AG, whose funds have backed BioNTech since its inception in 2008.

He added Sahin would typically walk into business meetings wearing jeans and carrying his signature bicycle helmet and backpack with him.

Doggedly pursuing his childhood dream of studying medicine and becoming a physician, Sahin worked at teaching hospitals in Cologne and the southwestern city of Homburg, where he met Tuereci during his early academic career.

Medical research and oncology became a shared passion.

Tuereci, the daughter of a Turkish physician who had migrated to Germany, said in a media interview that even on the day of their wedding, both made time for lab work.

Together they honed in on the immune system as a potential ally in the fight against cancer and tried to address the unique genetic makeup of each tumour.

Life as entrepreneurs started in 2001 when they set up Ganymed Pharmaceuticals to develop cancer-fighting antibodies, but Sahin – by then a professor at Mainz university – never gave up academic research and teaching.

They won funding from MIG AG as well as from Thomas and Andreas Struengmann, who sold their generic drugs business Hexal to Novartis in 2005.

For MIG’s Kromayer, Tuereci and Sahin are a “dream team” in that they reconciled their visions with the constraints of reality.

That venture was sold to Japan’s Astellas in 2016 for up to $1.4 billion. By then, the team behind Ganymed was already busy building BioNTech, founded in 2008, to pursue a much broader range of cancer immunotherapy tools.

That included mRNA, a versatile messenger substance to send genetic instructions into cells.

Coronavirus Breakout

When news of the coronavirus first surfaced at the start of the year, BioNTech, which employs 1,300 people, was quick to reallocate its resources. Sahin, its CEO, told Germany’s Manager Magazin that when he read about the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan in January, he told his wife that “in April they’ll have to shut the schools here”.

Germany entered its first lockdown in March, earlier than Sahin had anticipated, but by then his company had already developed 20 candidates for a vaccine, of which it would go on to test five for immune reactions in a research programme accompanied by 500 scientists called Lightspeed.

Sahin said in an interview in late October that the company could have managed to develop a vaccine on its own, but it would have struggled with the challenge of distribution.

The Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel wrote that their success was “balm for the soul” of Germans with Turkish roots after decades of being stereotyped as lowly educated greengrocers.

The year 2020 also marks the 10th anniversary of the publication of Germany Does Away With Itself, a book in which a former government official argued that Turkish migrants were dumbing down education standards in the country.

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