How Jews Changed the World

Özlem Türeci, Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer  By David Gelles • Nov. 10, 2020 Leer en españolLire en français Two years ago, Dr. Ugur Sahin took the stage at a conference in Berlin and made a bold prediction. 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. At the time, Dr. Sahin and his company, BioNTech, were little known outside the small world of European biotechnology start-ups. BioNTech, which Dr. Sahin founded with his wife, Dr. Özlem Türeci, was mostly focused on cancer treatments. It had never brought a product to market. Covid-19 did not yet exist. But his words proved prophetic. On Monday, BioNTech and Pfizer announced that a vaccine for the coronavirus developed by Dr. 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. 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. “It could be the beginning of the end of the Covid era,” Dr. Sahin said in an interview on Tuesday. BioNTech began work on the vaccine in January, after Dr. 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. Scientists at the company, based in Mainz, Germany, canceled vacations and set to work on what they called Project Lightspeed. “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. Sahin said in an interview last month. “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.” After BioNTech had identified several promising vaccine candidates, Dr. Sahin concluded that the company would need help to rapidly test them, win approval from regulators and bring the best candidate to market. BioNTech and Pfizer had been working together on a flu vaccine since 2018, and in March they agreed to collaborate on a coronavirus vaccine. Since then Dr. Sahin, who is Turkish, has developed a friendship with Albert Bourla, the Greek chief executive of Pfizer. The pair said in recent interviews that they had bonded over their shared backgrounds as scientists and immigrants. “We realized that he is from Greece and that I’m from Turkey,” Dr. Sahin said, without mentioning their native countries’ long-running antagonism. “It was very personal from the very beginning.”  Dr. Sahin, 55, was born in Iskenderun, Turkey. When he was 4 his family moved to Cologne, Germany where his parents worked at a Ford factory. He grew up wanting to be a doctor and became a physician at the University of Cologne. In 1993 he earned a doctorate from the university for his work on immunotherapy in tumor cells. Early in his career he met Dr. Türeci. She had early hopes to become a nun and ultimately wound up studying medicine. Dr. Türeci, now 53 and the chief medical officer of BioNTech, was born in Germany, the daughter of a Turkish physician who immigrated from Istanbul. On the day they were married, Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci returned to the lab after the ceremony. The pair were initially focused on research and teaching, including at the University of Zurich where Dr. Sahin worked in the lab of Rolf Zinkernagel, who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in medicine. In 2001 Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci founded Ganymed Pharmaceuticals which developed drugs to treat cancer using monoclonal antibodies. After several years they founded BioNTech as well, looking to use a wider range of technologies including messenger RNA to treat cancer. “We want to build a large European pharmaceutical company,” Dr. Sahin said in an interview with the Wiesbaden Courier, a local paper. Even before the pandemic, BioNTech was gaining momentum. The company raised hundreds of millions of dollars and now has more than 1,800 people on staff, with offices in Berlin, other German cities and Cambridge, Mass. In 2018 it began its partnership with Pfizer. Last year the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invested $55 million to fund its work treating H.I.V. and tuberculosis. Also in 2019 Dr. Sahin was awarded the Mustafa Prize, a biennial Iranian prize for Muslims in science and technology.  Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci sold Ganymed for $1.4 billion in 2016. Last year, BioNTech sold shares to the public; in recent months its market value has soared past $21 billion, making the couple among the richest in Germany. The two billionaires live with their teenage daughter in a modest apartment near their office. They ride bicycles to work. They do not own a car. “Ugur is a very, very unique individual,” Mr. Bourla, Pfizer’s chief executive, said in the interview last month. “He cares only about science. Discussing business is not his cup of tea. He doesn’t like it at all. He’s a scientist and a man of principles. I trust him 100 percent.”  In Germany where immigration continues to be a fractious issue the success of two scientists of Turkish descent was cause for celebration. “With this couple Germany has a shining example of successful integration,” wrote the conservative-business site Focus. A member of Parliament, Johannes Vogel, wrote on Twitter that if it was up to the far-right Alternative for Germany party, “there would be no #BioNTech of Germany with Özlem Türeci & Ugur Sahin at the top.” “If it were up to critics of capitalism and globalization,” he added, “there would be no cooperation with Pfizer. But that makes us strong: immigration country, market economy & open society!” Dr. Sahin has had little time for politics this year. BioNTech has been so busy developing a vaccine that the company has not finalized the financial details of its partnership agreement with Pfizer. “Trust and personal relationship is so important in such business because everything is going so fast,” Dr. Sahin said. “We still have a term sheet and not yet a final contract on many things.” Dr. Sahin said he and Dr. Türeci learned about efficacy data on Sunday night and marked the moment by brewing Turkish tea at home. “We celebrated, of course,” he said. “It was a relief.” Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting from Berlin. David Gelles is the Corner Office columnist and a business reporter, Twitter. @dgelles https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/business/biontech-covid-vaccine.html ……….. About Ozlem Tureci, Scientist, immunologist and cancer researcher Ozlem Tureci is the cofounder and chief medical officer of BioNTech, a German biotech firm. • In 2020 with Pfizer, BioNTech developed the first mRNA Covid vaccine to be approved for mass use. Tureci led the clinical development of the research, which BioNTech called Project Lightspeed. • Before cofounding BioNTech with her husband, Ugur Sahin, Tureci served as CEO and Chief Medical Officer for Ganymed Pharmaceuticals, which she also co-founded with Sahin and Christoph Huber. Tureci also serves as president of the Association for Cancer Immunotherapy (CIMT) in GermanyBorn in West Germany to Turkish immigrant parents, Tureci was destined for a career in science and healthcare: her mom was a biologist and her father was a surgeon. https://www.forbes.com/profile/ozlem-tureci/?sh=5b036b525493 …………………. Let’s begin with the vaccine. On Friday, November 13, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed a deal with the giant US pharmaceutical company Pfizer to purchase millions of coronavirus vaccine doses. It was only days after Pfizer announced clinical trials showed the vaccine was 90% effective at preventing COVID-19. Later reports raised its effectiveness to 95%. Pfizer’s CEO is Albert Bourla. Bourla is Jewish. He was born, raised and educated in Thessaloniki, in northern Greece. He left Greece with his wife when he was 34. In early 2020, Bourla pushed to accelerate Pfizer’s development of a possible vaccine against COVID-19. He did this in partnership with the German company BioNTech, founded by a Turkish-born married couple, Dr. Ugur Sahin, 55, and Dr. Ozlem Tureci, 53, who were educated in Germany, where they now live and work. Bourla boldly ordered preparations for production to begin, well before approval from the US Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Noubar Afeyan, 58, is co-founder and chairman of the biotech company Moderna. Afeyan is Armenian, emigrated from Lebanon to Canada and eventually did his doctorate at MIT. His company Moderna was born in the famous MIT lab of Prof. Robert Langer. • Moderna’s chief medical officer is Dr. Tal Zaks, an Israeli who completed his M.D. degree at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Like the Pfizer-BioNTech version, Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine too has proven highly effective in clinical trials. Dr. Zaks believes the initial doses will arrive in Israel in early 2021. https://www.jpost.com/jerusalem-report/how-jews-change-the-world-652199 …………. • NewsLocal After COVID, Cancer Vaccine on Horizon With vaccinations in full swing gene therapy for cancer may only be few years away. By Bob Bahr April 29, 2021 The gene science that led to the coronavirus vaccine has the potential to treat many diseases in the future. Scientists who helped develop the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine predict that same technology may be used to develop a vaccine for cancer. Dr. Ozlem Tureci who, with her husband runs the German research firm BioNTech that created the Pfizer vaccine, originally set up the company 13 years ago to develop new treatments for cancer. She told The Times of Israel last month that the firm now has “several different cancer vaccines” that are under development. “We expect that within only a couple of years, we will also have our vaccines [against] cancer at a place where we can offer them to people.” Both the COVID-19 vaccine and the new experimental cancer vaccines are based on technology that uses genetic matter known as messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA). The inoculations use gene therapy to deliver genetic instructions to individual cells in the body that can be manipulated to reflect newly emerging challenges to health. Emory University has started testing a reformulation of the Moderna vaccine that guards against COVID variants. These individual cells, in turn, develop proteins that create antibodies to act against dangerous viruses. Scientists at Emory Vaccine Center, for example, have begun testing a new formulation of the Moderna vaccine that is hoped can be more effective against the recent variants of the COVID-19 virus. The same mRNA technology can be used, in the case of cancer, to actually fight the malignancy. Dr. Mark Borodovsky of Georgia Tech has been an international leader in genetic research. Mark Borodovsky, a Georgia Tech biomechanical engineering professor, said this is a quick and easy way to stop disease. “The immune system is trained to create antibodies that, in case of a viral infection, guide the immune system and kill the virus.” The University of Texas MD Anderson Center scientists have already used mRNA based treatments to prevent the reoccurrence of cancer, which is said to be particularly the case in ovaries, the bladder and the brain. A reoccurrence of the disease takes place when cancer cells are not completely killed off by chemotherapy or radiation. In a clinical trial now in its second stage, researchers at the Anderson Center have developed mRNA vaccines individually tailored to each patient. The goal is to destroy the cancer cells still present in the body and permanently head off the disease. In his new book “The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of The Human Race,” Walter Isaacson describes these advances. Isaacson, who once served as president of CNN in Atlanta, spoke last month at the Book Festival of the MJCCA. Walter Isaacson’s new book was discussed in a program at the Book Festival of the MJCCA He describes in his book the speed of recent advances. It took only two days, for example, for Moderna to create the proper mRNA sequence that would be used in the new inoculation, and only 38 days before the first box of vials was shipped off to the National Institutes of Health to begin the first clinical trials. In earlier times vaccines that used other techniques often took years of trial and error before a proper immune response could be developed. In the case of the recent vaccine, Isaacson said it’s just a matter of unlocking the genetic code of the cell and a flood of new therapies could be developed. “These genetic improvements,” he says, “could permanently alter the human race.” The leaders in many of these efforts have often been Jewish scientists. The chairman and CEO of the international pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is Albert Bourla, the son of Greek Holocaust survivors. Tal Zaks, a native of Israel, is chief medical officer of Moderna, which developed the other vaccine widely in use in this country. Zaks has been working for years on using mRNA in an attempt to develop treatments for life threatening disease that could be personalized for each patient, so it was a quick pivot to focus on how an mRNA vaccine could be tailored to produce antibodies against the coronovirus. Borodovsky, who first came to Atlanta in the first wave of Jewish immigration from the Soviet Union in 1990, has been at the forefront of this rapidly developing frontier of modern medicine. As the founder and director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics at Georgia Tech, he has been instrumental in developing new ways of sequencing the genome, the key to the foundational building blocks of all human life. His work has been supported by The Marcus Foundation, funded by the cofounder of Home Depot Bernie Marcus. In 2006 Marcus gave the university $15 million to build a research center to explore what are called nano particles, the small building blocks of all matter. He also established the Marcus Center for Therapeutic Cell Characterization and Manufacturing to develop new medical initiatives in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. According to Dr. Borodovsky, recent medical advances and the COVID vaccines are simply technology urged on by the world’s medical needs, catching up with basic science. “It can take 30 years to come up with a concept and get this concept up to realization in a technological sense. So now we talk about several months.” https://www.atlantajewishtimes.com/after-covid-cancer-vaccine-on-horizon/ ………….. NewsLocal • After COVID, Cancer Vaccine on Horizon With vaccinations in full swing, gene therapy for cancer may only be few years away. By Bob Bahr April 29, 2021 The gene science that led to the coronavirus vaccine has the potential to treat many diseases in the future. • Scientists who helped develop the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine predict that same technology may be used to develop a vaccine for cancer. • Dr. Ozlem Tureci who, with her husband runs the German research firm BioNTech that created the Pfizer vaccine, originally set up the company 13 years ago to develop new treatments for cancer. She told The Times of Israel last month that the firm now has “several different cancer vaccines” that are under development. “We expect that within only a couple of years, we will also have our vaccines [against] cancer at a place where we can offer them to people.” Both the COVID-19 vaccine and the new experimental cancer vaccines are based on technology that uses genetic matter known as messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA). The inoculations use gene therapy to deliver genetic instructions to individual cells in the body that can be manipulated to reflect newly emerging challenges to health. Emory University has started testing a reformulation of the Moderna vaccine that guards against COVID variants. These individual cells, in turn, develop proteins that create antibodies to act against dangerous viruses. • Scientists at Emory Vaccine Center, for example, have begun testing a new formulation of the Moderna vaccine that is hoped can be more effective against the recent variants of the COVID-19 virus. The same mRNA technology can be used, in the case of cancer, to actually fight the malignancy. Dr. Mark Borodovsky of GeorgiaTech has been an international leader in genetic research. Mark Borodovsky, a Georgia Tech biomechanical engineering professor, said this is a quick and easy way to stop disease. “The immune system is trained to create antibodies that, in case of a viral infection, guide the immune system and kill the virus.” The University of Texas MD Anderson Center scientists have already used mRNA based treatments to prevent the reoccurrence of cancer, which is said to be particularly the case in ovaries, the bladder and the brain. A reoccurrence of the disease takes place when cancer cells are not completely killed off by chemotherapy or radiation. In a clinical trial now in its second stage, researchers at the Anderson Center have developed mRNA vaccines individually tailored to each patient. The goal is to destroy the cancer cells still present in the body and permanently head off the disease. In his new book “The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of The Human Race,” Walter Isaacson describes these advances. Isaacson, who once served as president of CNN in Atlanta, spoke last month at the Book Festival of the MJCCA. Walter Isaacson’s new book was discussed in a program at the Book Festival of the MJCCA • He describes in his book the speed of recent advances. It took only two days, for example, for Moderna to create the proper mRNA sequence that would be used in the new inoculation, and only 38 days before the first box of vials was shipped off to the National Institutes of Health to begin the first clinical trials. In earlier times, vaccines that used other techniques often took years of trial and error before a proper immune response could be developed. In the case of the recent vaccine, Isaacson said it’s just a matter of unlocking the genetic code of the cell and a flood of new therapies could be developed. “These genetic improvements,” he says, “could permanently alter the human race.” The leaders in many of these efforts have often been Jewish scientists. The chairman and CEO of the international pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is Albert Bourla, the son of Greek Holocaust survivors. Tal Zaks, a native of Israel, is chief medical officer of Moderna, which developed the other vaccine widely in use in this country. Zaks has been working for years on using mRNA in an attempt to develop treatments for life threatening disease that could be personalized for each patient, so it was a quick pivot to focus on how an mRNA vaccine could be tailored to produce antibodies against the coronovirus. Borodovsky, who first came to Atlanta in the first wave of Jewish immigration from the Soviet Union in 1990, has been at the forefront of this rapidly developing frontier of modern medicine. As the founder and director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics at Georgia Tech, he has been instrumental in developing new ways of sequencing the genome, the key to the foundational building blocks of all human life. His work has been supported by The Marcus Foundation, funded by the cofounder of Home Depot Bernie Marcus. In 2006 Marcus gave the university $15 million to build a research center to explore what are called nano particles, the small building blocks of all matter. He also established the Marcus Center for Therapeutic Cell Characterization and Manufacturing to develop new medical initiatives in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. According to Dr. Borodovsky, recent medical advances and the COVID vaccines are simply technology urged on by the world’s medical needs, catching up with basic science. “It can take 30 years to come up with a concept and get this concept up to realization in a technological sense. So now we talk about several months.” https://www.atlantajewishtimes.com/after-covid-cancer-vaccine-on-horizon/ …………. In his new book “The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of The Human Race,” Walter Isaacson describes these advances. Isaacson, who once served as president of CNN in Atlanta, spoke last month at the Book Festival of the MJCCA. Walter Isaacson’s new book was discussed in a program at the Book Festival of the MJCCA He describes in his book the speed of recent advances. It took only two days, for example, for Moderna to create the proper mRNA sequence that would be used in the new inoculation, and only 38 days before the first box of vials was shipped off to the National Institutes of Health to begin the first clinical trials. In earlier times, vaccines that used other techniques often took years of trial and error before a proper immune response could be developed. In the case of the recent vaccine, Isaacson said it’s just a matter of unlocking the genetic code of the cell and a flood of new therapies could be developed. “These genetic improvements,” he says, “could permanently alter the human race.” • The leaders in many of these efforts have often been Jewish scientists. The chairman and CEO of the international pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is Albert Bourla, the son of Greek Holocaust survivors. Tal Zaks, a native of Israel, is chief medical officer of Moderna, which developed the other vaccine widely in use in this country. • Zaks has been working for years on using mRNA in an attempt to develop treatments for life threatening disease that could be personalized for each patient, so it was a quick pivot to focus on how an mRNA vaccine could be tailored to produce antibodies against the coronovirus. Borodovsky, who first came to Atlanta in the first wave of Jewish immigration from the Soviet Union in 1990, has been at the forefront of this rapidly developing frontier of modern medicine. As the founder and director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics at Georgia Tech, he has been instrumental in developing new ways of sequencing the genome, the key to the foundational building blocks of all human life. His work has been supported by The Marcus Foundation, funded by the cofounder of Home Depot Bernie Marcus. In 2006 Marcus gave the university $15 million to build a research center to explore what are called nano particles, the small building blocks of all matter. He also established the Marcus Center for Therapeutic Cell Characterization and Manufacturing to develop new medical initiatives in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. According to Dr. Borodovsky, recent medical advances and the COVID vaccines are simply technology urged on by the world’s medical needs, catching up with basic science. “It can take 30 years to come up with a concept and get this concept up to realization in a technological sense. So now we talk about several months.” 12-22-2020 How Jews change the world - The Jerusalem Post https://www.jpost.com › Opinion ……………….......................