that Covid-19 was likely to become a global pandemic.

I did some calculations and calculated how many people were

infected. How many weeks how many people could have traveled,

how many people could be as symptomatic and every

calculation that I made clearly demonstrated. This is not any

more original outbreak, but the virus has already spread

worldwide.

Though it was over a month and a half before the World Health

Organization officially declared a pandemic, Sahin met with his

wife, BioNTech's co-founder and chief medical officer Özlem

Türeci, and together they agreed to redirect most of the

company's resources to developing a vaccine.

It was immediately clear to both of us that the technology we

had, which we had already clinically developed, could help

to ensure a rapid response.

Up until that point, BioNTech was primarily focused on

developing novel cancer treatments. The company was

little known internationally and had never brought a product to

market. They were still

a small, relatively unknown biotech company really working

on this cutting edge science.

The founders were confident in the potential of their mRNA

technology, which they knew could trigger a powerful immune

response. That confidence wasn't necessarily shared by the

broader medical community. No mRNA vaccine or treatment had

ever been approved before. But the couple's timely breakthrough

was actually decades in the making.

We understood that we would need to invest some time and it would

need innovations on different levels in order to make it

really work for vaccines and beyond. But the potential was

already clear there.

Sahin and Tureci, whose families both immigrated to Germany from

Turkey, met in the early 1990s, when they were working in the

cancer ward at a hospital in southwest Germany. Neither

envisioned a career in business.

During my time at medical faculties studying medicine, I

also started to do my PhD, which meant work in a laboratory. And

that actually caused a clash in my perception.

Tureci and Sahin both realized that while there was a little

they could offer terminal cancer patients in the ward, in the lab

they saw lots of potential for new treatments.

I was doing my lab work and understood that the immune

system could be a powerful weapon to fight cancer. And at a

certain time point, I realized that it's not only laboratory

work, but you have really to develop the therapies and you

need funding for that.

Out of desperation, I become became an entrepreneur and

founder companies because I understood that if you want to

use innovative research to develop medicines, you have to

do it yourself.

The couple had been studying messenger RNA or mRNA since the

late 1990s. The function of mRNA is essentially to teach

ourselves how to make specific proteins. But because mRNA is

very unstable and quickly degrades in the body, they knew

there was still a long way to go before it was ready for use in a

vaccine.

And at that time point, mRNA was used by a very small community.

So it was like a talent you see a young talent, you know all the

weaknesses and you know that you have to invest a lot of years to

make the technology mature.

So in the meantime, they co-founded their first company

Ganymed Pharmaceuticals in 2001. Ganymed used a more established

technology, monoclonal antibodies to treat stomach

cancer, and the couple sold the company for 1.4 billion in 2016.

It was Germany's biggest biotech deal ever. By that point, Sahin

and Tureci were already eigh years into their second ventur

BioNTech. When they founded th company in 2008, the couple fel

that they had improved th stability of mRNA enough t

focus on developin individualized cancer vaccine

So the biggest challenge in cancer treatment is that every

cancer is different, personalized or individualized.

Cancer vaccines are based on on getting the tumor off of the

patient and analyzing that tumor, then making a vaccine

which is tailored to the profile to the genetic profile of the of

the patient's tumor.

Unlike traditional vaccines, mRNA vaccines don't introduce a

weakened version of the virus into your body. Instead, the

mRNA instructs the body to make a specific virus protein that

will trigger an immune response and produce antibodies, which

can be used to fight off a cancer that's already growing,

or to protect against future COVID-19 infections. And while

traditional vaccines require scientists to collect and grow

large quantities of a virus, a process that can take months,

mRNA vaccines are much faster to produce. That's because they're

made from a DNA template in the lab, the sequence for which can

be shared electronically in an instant.

It's the most ancient information technology, which

means that the organism is prepared and has all the tools

to understand what you want to convey in terms of messages with

mRNA.

The vision and the scientific know how we're in place, but by

the beginning of 2020, BioNTech had still not gotten any of its

mRNA cancer vaccines approved for use in humans. The company

had never turned a profit. And when it IPO in 2019, it raised

about 100 million less than it had hoped for.

They were still a small, relatively unknown biotech

company, really working on this cutting edge science.

But the world was on the verge of changing. On the day when

Sahin realized that COVID-19 had already spread around the world,

few others were concerned. Europe had just reported its

first few Coronavirus cases, and Germany had not reported any

yet. But after Sahin and Tureci talked that morning in late

January, they immediately jumped into action.

On the weekend, we started to decide the vaccine sequences.

And on Monday, we met our teams explained them, this could

become a global outbreak and that we have the obligation to

do the best that we can do to come up with vaccine candidates.

And already on Tuesday, we had the full commitment of the whole

team to start the development of a new vaccine.

We are like in a military operation. The teams were

redirected. We never put our cancer programs at hold. So they

went on while those parts of our company who could really help

with COVID-19 project started step by step to pick up pace and

work on a project litespeed.

BioNTech knew that to successfully produce tests and

manufacture a Covid vaccine on a global scale, it would need a

bigger partner. The company had already partnered with Pfizer,

having worked with him since 2018, to develop an mRNA based

flu vaccine, which is currently in clinical trials. And so

naturally BioNTech turn to them.

We approach Pfizer in early February, which was very early

because no one really believed that there was a pandemic. And

as everyone else, our Pfizer colleagues did not really

believe that a pandemic vaccine would be needed.

And the response to that point from Pfizer was no. And I talked

with Pfizer CEO about this. And he was saying essentially at

that point early on, he was really focused on Pfizer's

operations in China, Pfizer's people in China, and he wasn't

yet thinking about developing a vaccine.

Undeterred, BioNTech initially went at it alone, developing not

just one but for vaccine candidates. The company started

preparing for phase one clinical trials in Germany, which would

test the vaccine in humans. By this time, others were starting

to catch on.

COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic. Dow is now down more

than 1100 points as moments ago, the who has formally declared

the Coronavirus, a global pandemic.

And now the extreme new measures in the US. Large events banned

in Washington State and San Francisco. As U.S. cases rise

over 1000. Less

than a week after the pandemic was declared Pfizer agreed to

work with BioNTech to help them scale up their clinical trials

production and distribution.

We had our first patient in on on April 23. It was the first

volunteer and in July, we started phase three clinical

trial. This was already in partnership with Pfizer, which

allowed us to move fast from the early stage of clinical

development to the to the latest stage of development.

So as they were starting phase one they were designing and

figuring out phase two as they were getting into phase two,

they were figuring out these massive phase three clinical

trials that they managed to start in the summer, and the FDA

and regulators globally were working on being incredibly

flexible.

Over 43,000 participants were enrolled in the company's phase

three trials, which measured how many vaccinated participants

contracted Covid compared to the unvaccinated placebo group.

Sahin and Tureci we're by no means certain that the vaccine

would work at all.

We knew that vaccine is able to activate the immune system, but

it didn't know whether the immune system is able to control

the virus. So as a scientist, my expectation was it would be

great if we have 70% efficacy. But I was also aware that if the

immune system is not able to control we might have just a

negative result and getting the call on Sunday evening and

hearing that we have 95% efficacy. This was

extraordinary, of course high much higher than than we had

expected.

And it brought this just amazing hope that we would be able to