The marriage made a breakthrough. They created the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine in a few weeks [FRAGMENT OF THE BOOK]

As the world went numb with fear of the coronavirus in early 2020, all hopes were placed on finding a vaccine. But how do you develop a life-saving formulation when every second counts and every mistake you make can be catastrophic?

1. Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin are privately married, working – a couple of scientists who have been working on mRNA technology for many years
2. When the mysterious virus began to spread around the world, they knew they had to use their experience to create a vaccine
3. Within a few weeks, they developed the formula of the preparation. After months of testing, it turned out that the vaccine has very good efficacy results and is safe. It was clear that this would change the course of the pandemic
4. The book «The Vaccine» by Joe Miller tells how it happened that in such a short time a vaccine against COVID-19 was created by the duo of BioNTech and Pfizer
5. Check your health. Just answer these questions
6. More information can be found on the Onet homepage

BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine makers

Long-time research partners and spouses Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin did just that in weeks, relying on cutting edge mRNA technology that they had been working on together for decades.

At the same time, they had to convince big pharmaceutical companies to support their ambitious project, as well as deftly avoid the politicians of the European Union and the Donald Trump administration, who were interfering with their three cents. However, they overcame all obstacles and delivered over two billion doses of the life-saving BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine to countries around the world in record time.

Suspenseful like a sensational novel, “Vaccine” is a true story of an amazing race against time, revealing the backstage of one of the most groundbreaking discoveries in modern medicine.

As US News wrote: “Doctors Şahin and Türeci explain how 30 years of scientific research laid the foundations for the first COVID-19 vaccine, at a time when confidence in its safety and effectiveness are key to humanity finding a way out of the pandemic.”

The book, in collaboration with Şahin and Türeci, was written by Joe Miller – the correspondent of the Financial Times in Frankfurt, who reported on the BioNTech project on an ongoing basis. The author interviewed over fifty people: scientists, politicians, health officials and company employees.

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In a manner accessible to the average reader, he provided details that will interest even seasoned microbiologists: we learn about the key events of the remarkable 2020, as well as the scientific, economic and personal basis of innovation in the field of medicine. The vaccine explains the scientific aspects of a breakthrough at a crucial time when public confidence in the safety and effectiveness of vaccines is critical to contain the pandemic.

Vaccine, Joe Miller, Dr. Uğur Şahin, Dr. Özlem Türeci, Poradnia K publishing house, translated by Krzysztof Mazurek.

Courtesy of Poradnia K publishing house, we are publishing an excerpt from the book below.

How was the COVID-10 BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine developed?

The phone rang around eight in the evening. “Mum looked like she was about to cry, and then my dad’s phone rang”, their daughter recalls. «The caller asked:» Are you alone? «»

Pfizer’s CEO, Albert Bourla, spoke on the speakerphone, but Ozlem and the teenager were eagerly nodding his head to keep him talking. «Do you want to know the data?» Albert asked, keeping the sonic equivalent of the poker face. “No,” Uğur joked, but this attempt failed. The next few seconds felt like an eternity until Albert broke the tense silence with the words: “All right! It works!”. He suspended his voice to enhance the effect and added, “Works great.”

Less than ten months after Uğur and Özlem – in the same room – discussed the possibility of developing an mRNA vaccine against an unnamed pathogen raging in China, it turned out that their lead candidate has over 90 percent. effectiveness in disease prevention. The tiny organism that jumped from animal to human stopped the whole world on the run. It has already cost over a million lives, and it looks like it will take millions more.

The first phase of the study proved that the vaccine is absolutely capable of activating all the forces of the immune system and is broad-based – Uğur interviewed described the immune response as “ideal”. They were both sitting on high heels, not knowing how the enemy – SARS-CoV-2 – would behave when attacked and trapped by immune system troops. Contrary to all expectations, it turned out that thanks to their persistence and commitment to science, the virus was defeated.

A few minutes earlier, Kathrin Jansen [Pfizer Research Manager – Ed. Ed.], who had withdrawn from work for a while and was resting with her husband at a hotel in the Hudson Valley to recharge her batteries, was sitting in front of her laptop, finishing her late breakfast. From the screen, she was looked at by members of the data and security monitoring board, a group of external experts who also participated in the videoconference. This panel, which since October analyzed infection data from the massive phase three of the BioNTech and Pfizer study, began to urgently discuss the methodology used to test the confirmed blood results of 94 volunteers who contracted COVID-19 – out of a total of 43. 538 – keeping the Pfizer syndrome in tremendous tension. Then the experts explained the discrepancy – only four of the infected were given twice the dose of the real vaccine, the remaining 90 received a placebo. The calculations were clear: the vaccine, code-named BNT162b2, far exceeded the FDA’s XNUMX percent coronavirus protection threshold. In fact, it has outpaced many of the commonly used vaccines, including mumps, yellow fever and rabies viruses, which were developed under calmer conditions.

When the conversation was over, Kathrin called Albert, sitting in a conference room at Pfizer’s New York headquarters, surrounded by the company’s top management, and gave him the message. «We have a damn effective vaccine!» Albert shouted loudly, throwing his fist into the air. Champagne was brought in and toasts were made. Kathrin, who is not a woman of emotional expression, admits that she had a tear in her eye, and later she happily drank a glass of champagne as well. “Uğur did not expect it and I did not expect it, Kathrin did not expect it, no one expected the result to be so high,” says Albert. «I realized that this changed the rules of the game».

In Mainz, Uğur and Özlem, who did not drink, made themselves black tea and when they “jumped around the apartment”, they enjoyed the cake baked by their daughter. “It was an amazing relief,” recalls Uğur. “There were many indications that the vaccine provided immunity,” he says, “but until then there was no definitive proof that it really was.”

It was then that Uğur and Özlem realized for the first time that the vaccine would certainly not harm those who later contracted COVID-19. A phase one study in Berlin and Mannheim only showed that the vaccine itself was safe, not that its immune response would prove too strong in the event of subsequent infection. Meanwhile, tests in primates showed no signs of ADE, or antibody-dependent potentiation – a condition in which a vaccine would help the virus infect cells. Now there was real evidence that this phenomenon did not occur. The horrific scenarios that materialized in Washington in the XNUMXs – when children who had received the RSV vaccine died – and animal studies of early SARS and MERS vaccine candidates that ultimately harmed test subjects have now not materialized. Nor has a cytokine storm been observed where overzealous infantry in the immune army attack healthy organs. There were six deaths in a Phase XNUMX trial with the coronavirus vaccine, but none were related to vaccination. “This is,” Uğur told his wife, still unable to believe what had happened – “the perfect result”.

From the end of January, they had both woken up to the thought that they had never spoken aloud that the Lightspeed project could fail miserably, leaving the company being built so reverently in debt and risking previous cancer drug research to failure. Now, as they sat side by side on the couch, tea in hand, they spoke openly for the first time about how enormous this disaster would be.

“For months we had been moving at the speed of light, and suddenly it seemed to us that time has stopped,” says Uğur. “We allowed ourselves to explode and think about what it would have meant for us and for the team that had been working day and night for so many months if this success had not happened.” The two scientists also considered many deliberate decisions and discussed the random encounters that led them up to this point. “We thought aloud about what this meant for the world,” remembers Özlem. “We felt happy and grateful that nature showed people so much compassion.”

As both Pfizer and BioNTech are publicly traded companies, a Turkish couple could not share the news with anyone other than board members and senior employees of the company until the data was released to the public. “At that moment, it was the most important information in the world” Albert says, especially since Pfizer planned to seek emergency approval from the FDA as soon as possible. Uğur was unable to call Thomas Strüngmann, the benefactor of BioNTech, who was to be handsomely rewarded for his steadfast faith and belief in the company’s abilities. However, he called Helmut Jeggli, president of BioNTech, and Michael Motschmann, investor and supervisory board member, who first introduced Uğur to Thomas.

It was XNUMX p.m. and Michael was walking around wondering what he would say to Uğur if the results disappointed everyone. “I was already wondering how I would restore his strength to work if something went wrong,” she says. Moments later, his fears vanished. “Michael,” Uğur said over the phone, “is even better than we thought.”

At 9pm German time the next day – Monday, November XNUMX – Pfizer and BioNTech announced their groundbreaking data. The reaction was stronger than anyone at both companies expected. The prices of both stocks soared, and their market values ​​rose by billions of dollars. BioNTech appreciated to such an extent that it was valued on par with the 157-year-old pharmaceutical giant Bayer, the manufacturer of aspirin. Equity markets also surged – in New York the S&P 500 index opened to a record high, with investors expecting an imminent end to the pandemic putting capital into shares of airlines such as IAG (owner of British Airways) and Air France-KLM oil prices surged sharply on the stock exchanges.

Personal messages from all over the world poured into Uğur and Özlem. «I can tell all my friends that I know the BioNTech team. Usually we don’t brag about anything, but we will definitely brag about it !!!!!!! » – Uğur read in an e-mail from one of the first investors. «This could be the greatest discovery in the last 100 years !!!» – said a fellow scientist and friend of Uğur for ten years, while another wrote: “Celebrate!”.

Anthony Fauci, who hoped the vaccine would be 75% effective, described the result as “simply extraordinary” and told reporters that the data “gives credence to the mRNA platform”. The news, he said, meant that it was very likely that other vaccines would also be effective, opening the door to humanity’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. “This largely confirms that the vaccine is targeting the spike protein and […] hence the immune response,” he said, pointing to the fact that most other manufacturers have also chosen to focus on this viral bulge. BioNTech and Pfizer may be “the first to come out of the shadows”, but as others are working on 11 vaccines and are in Phase XNUMX of their research, more are coming soon.

The good news on the vaccine battle front also made it easier for governments to justify lockdowns, especially in Europe, where the Second Wave was looming and restrictions were re-imposed after a summer of relative freedom. In Germany, the “emergency brake was applied” just a few days earlier, closing restaurants and entertainment venues once more, and severely reducing people-to-people contacts. The data announced by BioNTech, however, gave the world a glimmer of hope. People just needed a little more patience.

Mainz – a city so far famous for announcing the printing revolution to the world – became the epicenter of the medical revolution and made headlines around the world. Our little vial of hope – was the title in the British Daily Mirror, with a photo of the BioNTech vaccine vial below it. In the Times, above an old photograph of Uğura and Özl, smiling broadly in their lab coats, there was a chart of the company’s stock prices, and the headline screamed: Vaccination Milestone Heralds “Normal Life in Spring”.

The Economist wrote that the efficacy data signified “the beginning of the end of the pandemic”.

The media around the world was bothering the BioNTech PR team, flooding it with hundreds of questions and requests per hour.

It was the first time that Uğur and Özlem were interviewed together as business partners and a married couple. In March, Uğur got angry with a reporter who tried to outline his personality profile in the press, and told Jasmin Alatovič, head of BioNTech’s external communications department, that he did not like to talk about himself. Now, with news of the vaccine’s effectiveness to report, both he and Özlem were overjoyed to inform journalists via the Zoom platform of what was happening. They sat in the kitchenette that functioned as their makeshift office, with one little plant in the background, and talked about the enormous importance of the new discovery for the whole world. Uğur often forgot to close the door behind him and the lounge was exposed to the rear. “I became a floor-crawler specialist,” recalled their daughter, who tried to avoid transmitting her person around the world. Under these conditions, practicing the violin was out of the question for the young girl.

Newspapers wrote about Uğur and Özl, politicians in Berlin and Brussels, whom Helmut had been trying to persuade to cooperate for months, also sent lapidary congratulations to the president of BioNTech. However, there was someone who was still unhappy. Donald Trump, already questioning the result of the presidential election in which he was defeated, fired a series of tweets. «As I have said for a long time, @Pfizer and others announced the news of the Vaccine after the Election because they did not have the courage to do so sooner. Likewise, @US_FDA should have announced it earlier, not for political reasons, but to save lives! » – he wrote. He further argued that the Democrats deliberately delayed data on vaccine effectiveness.

Trump was due to leave the White House in three months, but his public undermining of confidence in the vaccine remained a threat.

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