Fresh faces that left their mark in 2020 | India News
Rumita Patel
In a miraculous success story, scientists Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci, who have dedicated their lives to finding cures for infectious diseases and cancer, helped create the Covid-19 vaccine that is being developed by Pfizer. “It could be the beginning of the end of the Covid era,” Dr. Sahin told the New York Times.
Sahin was born in Turkey and moved to Cologne when he was 4 years old with his parents who had found work in a Ford factory there. He became a doctor and investigated tumor cell immunotherapy. Türeci was born to a Turkish medical father in Germany. She was hoping to become a nun, says the NYT, but ended up studying medicine, which brought her and Sahin together.
The multimillionaire founders of the German company BioNTech still live in a “modest apartment” near their office and cycle to work. “They don’t have a car,” says The New York Times.
As researchers, the couple focused on drugs to treat cancer using monoclonal antibodies before moving on to other technologies, including mRNA, which has become their claim to fame this year. Two years ago, Sahin told a conference in Berlin that technology could be key to rapidly developing a vaccine for a new pandemic. His words have been prescient and he knows that few companies have the “capacity and competence” to do it as quickly as BioNTech.
