“The corona epidemic still has Germany firmly under
control. But the two scientists and entrepreneurs who, with their company
Biontech, have developed a vaccine against the infectious disease in record
time and manufactured it billions of times, are already thinking two steps
ahead. On Wednesday Ugur Sahin and his wife Özlem Türeci, the CEO and head of
science at Biontech, celebrated the topping-out ceremony for a new production
facility in Mainz, together with the Prime Minister of Rhineland-Palatinate,
Malu Dreyer (SPD).
However, more doses of the corona vaccine should not
be produced there. Rather, it is about the idea with which Sahin and Türeci
founded their company almost 15 years ago, but which has not yet become a
marketable product: individually tailored immunotherapies for cancer patients.
This is based on the knowledge that, depending on
the genetic prerequisites, cancer progresses differently from patient to
patient, from tumor to tumor, and therefore different drug therapies promise
success. "We are driven by the dream of translating our science into
patient survival," said Türeci. Prime Minister Dreyer mentioned that she
had heard of Türeci's and Sahin's plans twenty years ago, when she was still
the Health Minister of Rhineland-Palatinate. “It was a risk. Back then you were
before your time, you are now again, as is so often the case."
"First system of its kind worldwide"
From 2023 onwards, 500 Biontech employees in the new
three-story building in Mainz will produce around 10,000 such drugs per year; from taking blood and tumor samples from the patient to administering the
respective medication, which, like the corona vaccine from Biontech, will be
based on the so-called mRNA technology to activate the body's own defenses, it
should only take six weeks - in the pharmaceutical industry a revolutionary
short period.
Sahin described the factory as “the first system of
its kind in the world”, of which the shell is now standing. Biontech is
currently testing a number of cancer vaccines of the new type on patients; the
most advanced are substances for the treatment of colon cancer and melanoma. It is not yet clear whether they will one day be approved or not.
"If we are successful with it, we want to be able to produce it on the
first day after approval," announced Sahin.
The fact that Biontech can afford the risky
investment is due to the phenomenal success of the corona vaccine developed and
sold together with the American company Pfizer. For the current year, the
Biontech management plans with income of up to 17 billion euros from the sale of the
vaccine; By the end of September alone, a net profit of around 7 billion euros
was posted. Biontech has not yet had any other commercially marketable
products. The company, whose majority owners have been the twin brothers Thomas
and Andreas Strüngmann, who became rich through the establishment and later
sale of the pharmaceutical company Hexal, is currently valued at almost 78
billion euros on the New York Stock Exchange.
Sahin had recently spurred the share price by saying
that Biontech's corona vaccine will probably also work against the new Omicron
variant of the virus, in his opinion. In addition, he referred to the
"Wall Street Journal" on the effectiveness against the variants that
have occurred so far and on the double protective mechanism of the vaccination,
which stimulates the body not only to produce antibodies, but also to build up
T cells, which prevents serious disease progression. If changes to
the vaccine should be necessary, they could be made within a few weeks, said
Sahin. Nobody should lose their nerve because of Omicron, rather it is a matter
of giving everyone booster vaccinations as quickly as possible.
The CEO of the American manufacturer Moderna, which
also produces an mRNA vaccine against corona, was previously more skeptical.
The Omicron variant contains so many mutations, said Moderna boss Stephane
Bancel, that modifications are probably necessary to maintain the protective
effect."
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