It was a great European moment. We were in Thessaloniki in northern Greece, assembled inside the fourth-century rotunda, a magnificent building which in its almost 1,700 years of existence has served as a Roman temple, a Byzantine church and an Ottoman mosque. We had gathered on this warm evening to see the Empress Theophano Prize being awarded to Özlem Türeci and Uur ahin, the scientist couple who, as leaders of the firm they founded, BioNTech, developed the first vaccine against Sars-CoV-2, or Covid-19.
Where better than Thessaloniki—formerly Salonica, home to Aristotle and Alexander the Great—to celebrate these modern scientific pioneers? In a city that has belonged to many nations, and which was made great by migration, an audience of local dignitaries and Greek VIPs, including the president, saluted these two children of migrants, German citizens with Turkish ancestry, who received their award standing in front of the Greek and European Union flags.
The next morning I spent some time with ahin and Türeci, to ask them about their method and approach.
As young oncologists they had become convinced that an individualised approach to cancer treatment could be more successful than a more broad brush, “one treatment suits all” approach. “We learned early in our career that every tumour is different,” ahin told me. “We said: if every tumour is different, can we develop a treatment which can be tailored? At that time, in the mid 1990s, this was a crazy idea…”
Türeci, ahin’s wife, chipped in to add a gloss to this thought: “It still is.” To which he responded: “But now we are much closer. It’s less crazy.”
It was BioNTech’s expertise in new “messenger” RNA (mRNA) technology, which they believe will make more sophisticated and personalised cancer treatment possible, that meant ahin and Türeci could offer a rapid route to creating a Covid-19 vaccine.
On Friday 24th January 2020, ahin read about the new coronavirus in medical journal the Lancet. The following Monday, he told his team that the company might be able to provide a response. By November they had developed an effective vaccine.
“We knew that we had a technology that could help,” ahin told me. “We felt the responsibility… The first thing was to go to the team and explain it as we always do, in a scientifically accurate way… it was really about stating the facts, and saying we are going to have a real problem, and we might have a solution, and we feel that we should do it.”
BioNTech is the second business ahin and Türeci have launched together. Their success seems to be down to serious and modest persistence, allied to a skilful hiring strategy.
“We had the privilege to start as leaders with small groups of scientists, with no other co-workers, then we hired our first PhD students and technicians,” ahin said. “As a scientist what you first do is educate and teach your students. So we started really with the mindset [that we had] not only co-workers who were helping us but to educate and teach them. ahin and Türeci were academics before starting their own business.
“We wanted to generate a strong team,” ahin added. “What you do in a scientific community ideally is you teach your students, and your students grow up, and they teach other students.
“So our group grew slowly. And this was of course great because if a group grows slowly you can not only teach science but you also teach culture. And values. And since we were so close—we were in the labs—it is not just talking about values but living the values.”
In the Covid era, many of us have studied diagrams of viruses and looked at images of protein spikes, perhaps mistakenly believing that we have suddenly acquired sophisticated scientific insight. “Today more people understand mRNA technology than understand the offside rule in football,” ahin joked.
In fact, BioNTech’s knowledge has been hard and steadily won. “We had our lab meetings,” he said. “And in lab meetings scientists don’t have a hierarchy. Science is not about hierarchy. It’s really about understanding. That means it is not important who says something, but what is said. This was a natural growth of the culture. And when we started our first company many of our team members from university joined us in the company. That means the DNA of the company, the culture of the company, was the same DNA that we had had in our academic career.
“If you are able to attract the right people who love science—that is what is really important. To attract people who love what they do. Attract people who are purpose-driven. We are driven by purpose, we want to have patients, and our daily work is driven by curiosity.
“We see science as global. It’s not about competition with the next group or company, it is really global. And the ambition that we have—we really want to do something new. It does not make sense just to repeat what others did. That is not research, it is recapitulation. Which could be useful in some circumstances, but our ambition is really to come up with a solution that does not yet exist.”
At the award ceremony, Türeci spoke of the need for scientists to remain both curious and humble. “Courage is essential for research,” she said, “you have to love the unknown.” And humility means “staying teachable regardless of how much you know already.”
“We are wanderers between worlds,” she added, referring to the many disciplines BioNTech draws on to succeed.
The firm’s research is “not inter-disciplinary, it has to be cross-disciplinary,” Türeci explained to me the next day. The firm contains both medical and computational science experts, and works with cutting-edge AI. “There have to be people who understand both disciplines, the languages of both disciplines, and this is what we try to do,” Türeci said. “It’s not that everyone is in their silo thinking that the other discipline will know what to do. That does not work—by them throwing their puzzle pieces onto our desk. We have to work together to find out how they fit.”
For the future, BioNTech believes it is getting close to an even bigger breakthrough on cancer treatments. “Our ambition is to develop something which is disruptive, which could really change things,” ahin said.
“First of all we want to continue our cancer work, of course. Our vision is to enable a new type of treatment. Personalised cancer immunotherapy. This is currently being tested in clinical trials. We will do more. There could be positive results in two or three years.
“We could bring this new type of treatment where the vaccine is tailored to the tumour of the patient. We can bring that to the market. That would be the next innovation in the cancer field. This is for cancer, but now we have the opportunity to go beyond cancer. We believe it could be useful for inflammatory diseases: allergies, auto-immune diseases, multiple sclerosis.”
The ingenious idea at the heart of these new treatments is getting the body to treat itself—an idea that to me sounds radically new.
“Actually it’s an old concept,” ahin says. “But now we have completely different tools. We can communicate with the body. If we understand the language of the body we can send ‘words’ to get a response—that’s really the exciting part. Medicine is going to be closer to information technology.”
So the answer may lie within our own bodies, and nature, as they say, is cleverer than we are? “Yes, of course,” ahin replies.
“Nature has to be cleverer,” Türeci adds. “It had more time to experiment and find solutions. When we decided we had to develop immune therapies against cancer we asked the question: the immune system is there in evolution for millions of years, it has seen all the tricks and responded to them. And the immune system was perfected against pathogens, because this was what our ancestors and other mammals were encountering.
“The principle is to learn from the mechanisms of the natural immune system, which it optimised against pathogens, and redirect it against cancer. This is why we could respond to Covid so fast. What we were trying to do all those years was to take those principles and redirect them against something else.”
Also in the audience at the award ceremony in Thessaloniki was Albert Bourla, chief executive of Pfizer, the giant pharmaceutical company which partnered with BioNTech to mass produce the Covid vaccine that has been used more than any other around the world, and whose booster is proving to be an effective barrier against the new omicron variant.
Bourla was born in Thessaloniki and studied at the city’s Aristotle University, taking a PhD in biotechnology. The son of Sephardic Jews, who were among the handful of survivors of the Nazis out of the city’s 50,000-strong community, he joined Pfizer and later emigrated to the US. We should welcome migration at this time of labour shortages, just as we should welcome technological innovation. You never know what the new arrivals will be capable of.
