The pair said in recent interviews that they had bonded over their shared backgrounds as scientists and immigrants. Sahin, who is Turkish, has developed a friendship with Albert Bourla, the Greek chief executive of Pfizer. BioNTech and Pfizer had been working together on a flu vaccine since 2018, and in March, they agreed to collaborate on a coronavirus vaccine. Sahin concluded that the company would need help to rapidly test them, win approval from regulators and bring the best candidate to market. “So it felt not like an opportunity, but a duty to do it, because I realized we could be among the first coming up with a vaccine.”Īfter BioNTech had identified several promising vaccine candidates, Dr. “There are not too many companies on the planet which have the capacity and the competence to do it so fast as we can do it,” Dr. Scientists at the company, based in Mainz, Germany, canceled vacations and set to work on what they called Project Lightspeed. Sahin read an article in the medical journal The Lancet that left him convinced that the coronavirus, at the time spreading quickly in parts of China, would explode into a full-blown pandemic. Sahin said in an interview on Tuesday.īioNTech began work on the vaccine in January, after Dr. “It could be the beginning of the end of the Covid era,” Dr. The stunning results vaulted BioNTech and Pfizer to the front of the race to find a cure for a disease that has killed more than 1.2 million people worldwide. Sahin and his team was more than 90 percent effective in preventing the disease among trial volunteers who had no evidence of having previously been infected. On Monday, BioNTech and Pfizer announced that a vaccine for the coronavirus developed by Dr. It had never brought a product to market. Özlem Türeci, was mostly focused on cancer treatments. Sahin and his company, BioNTech, were little known outside the small world of European biotechnology start-ups. Speaking to a roomful of infectious disease experts, he said his company might be able to use its so-called messenger RNA technology to rapidly develop a vaccine in the event of a global pandemic.Īt the time, Dr. Ugur Sahin took the stage at a conference in Berlin and made a bold prediction.
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