Pfizer’s Hidden Treasures in a Dream Team

Pfizer has approval for their COVID vaccine — but the real treasure may be the couple behind that technology…

Britain has approved Pfizer’s vaccine against COVID-19. Pfizer is set to ship almost a million doses within a week, with the elderly in care facilities and their healthcare providers given top priority, followed by those over 80 years old and healthcare workers.

Clearly this is a triumph of science, industry and regulators working openly and in synchrony to defeat a global pandemic.

But Pfizer has a secret treasure in a married scientist-couple who discovered and developed the RNA vaccine being pushed out at lightspeed.

1. The Dream Team…

BioNTech is the German company with whom Pfizer partnered early on to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. The scientists at the heart of BioNTech are Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, a husband-and-wife couple worth billions who commute to work on bicycles. Sahin is the chief executive officer and Tureci is the chief medical officer.

The couple founded BioNTech in 2008 along with Sahin’s former professor, Christopher Huber, to develop pharmaceuticals based on messenger RNA (mRNA). The primary targets for their mRNA therapies included individualized cancer immunotherapy, training the patient’s immune system to target cancer cells. Cancer immunology had long been a shared passion and profession for the couple.

In January 2020, Sahin and Tureci discussed an article in The Lancet, a British medical journal, reporting a then-mysterious respiratory illness in China. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, they quickly realized the potential for a global pandemic and set up Project Lightspeed within their company. Luckily, BioNTech and Pfizer already had a partnership for a flu vaccine, so they agreed verbally to collaborate on a COVID-19 vaccine.

Sahin told the AP, “This trust-based relationship is one of the key factors why we have been so fast, because it allowed us to share data, to share information, to start to avoid any type of delay.”

Trust and openness with data beats a closed and paranoid approach to technology development.

Both Sahin and Tureci have Turkish heritage. Sahin emigrated to Cologne, Germany from Turkey at the age of four, so his parents could work in the city’s automotive factories. Tureci’s parents immigrated to Lastrup in southern Germany, where she was born. They met at the Saarland University Hospital in Homburg, Germany, where Tureci was finishing her last year of medical school, and Sahin was working as a physician. They married in 2002 and have a teenaged daughter.

Sahin and Tureci co-founded Ganymed Pharmaceuticals in 2001 where they developed a monoclonal antibody Zolbetuximab aimed at esophageal and gastrointestinal cancer. They sold the company to Astellas Pharma in 2016.

2. The Treatment…

BioNTech quickly developed a candidate COVID-19 vaccine dubbed BNT162b2. This drug is a modified nucleoside mRNA (modified so the immune system does not destroy it, believing it to be an RNA virus like SARS-CoV-2). The purpose of an mRNA is to carry the genetic code normally stored in within a gene in the nuclear DNA, out of the nucleus and into the body of the cell where the mRNA code is read to make a protein.

In the case of BNT162b2, the mRNA code contains instructions for making only the spike protein which the SARS-CoV-2 virus uses as a key to enter our cells. This will train our immune cells to recognize the viral spikes, and therefore destroy the virus itself.

The mRNA vaccine is encapsulated within solid lipid nanoparticles to aid delivery into cells.

BNT162b2 requires two doses three weeks apart, and has a reported 95% efficacy against COVID-19 4 weeks after the first dose. Pfizer reports consistent efficacy across various demographics such as age, gender, race, etc, and reported over 94% efficacy in adult patients over 65 years of age.

Pfizer reported no serious safety concerns during the clinical trial involving over 43,000 participants worldwide.

During the trial, Pfizer observed ten severe cases of COVID-19, nine occurred in the placebo group, and one occurred in the BNT162b2 vaccine group.

An important aspect of Pfizer’s vaccine which may limit global distribution is the requirement for storage at -70°C±10°C, or dry ice conditions.

3. The Take-away…

BioNTech demonstrated an approach that is diametrically opposed to that of Moderna, who I wrote about here.

Moderna, as I showed, is highly secretive with their data and their approach, which hampers transparent and critical assessment of their vaccine. Moderna’s executives demonstrate a concern for self-enrichment, and toady up to similar wealth-enchanted personalities in the current political environment, including the president.

I would not trust the Moderna vaccine until it has gone through a fully transparent approval process independent of the Trump administration. I will not trust the current FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization for Moderna. I’ll wait for the Biden administration’s approval.

BioNTech, in contrast, is more open, trusting, publishing their data in scientific journals so that it can be peer reviewed. They demonstrate a concern for the patients, the people around the world who need the vaccine.

Sure, the founders are worth billions. But that is not their passion. Sahin and Tureci’s passion is finding solutions to hard, heartbreaking medical problems like cancer, like COVID-19.

This is not a technical decision, but if I had a choice, I would certainly choose to take the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, now that it has gone through the British approval process.

I am not surprised that Pfizer beat Moderna to the punch, despite the latter’s more secretive and competitive methods. Openness beats secrecy.