Shooting for the moon: in-conversation with BioNTech

Vlado Perkovic: I'm Vlado Perkovic. I’ve just finished my first month as Provost here at UNSW. And what a privilege that also is. I have pleasure also tonight and being your host. To start I'd like to acknowledge that we're meeting on the lands of the Bidjigal people and pay my respects to their elders, past and present. I extend that respect also to all of our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander colleagues, and particularly any that are here with us tonight. I now have the great pleasure of welcoming our distinguished guests, Dr Uğur Şahin and Dr Özlem Türeci. What an amazing influence you've had on the health of millions of people around the world and the millions of lives that you've saved through your work. It's very rare for us to be in a room where every single person has likely benefited from the work that you've done, but I think that’s likely to be the case here. Hands up, who’s had one of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines?

So, a direct and very personal contribution. We’re going to spend the next 45 minutes or so exploring a little bit about you, about the company you founded, about how and why you decided to pursue the COVID-19 vaccine opportunity, and then, about how and why you're moving into different areas now; what you see the future holding. But maybe if I could ask you to start – in this country, we talk a lot about the need for innovation, the need to translate discoveries into commercial outcomes and the role, the way that we should promote the formation of companies using the power of the commercial sector to improve health outcomes. If I've read correctly, you've got over 500 patents that you hold, and you've launched several companies. Why did you go down this path? Given your background as esteemed and distinguished clinicians and academics?

Özlem Türeci: First of all, before I answer your question, I would like to say, also on behalf of Uğur, that we are very honoured that we are now a part of this family, right? This is what an honorary doctorate means – that we are now members of your family. So thank you for that, we are very grateful.

Applause

So the question was why we went down this path. We are both physicians, and we started as young physicians in oncology and made an experience which many of you have made. There are many medical doctors here. Namely, this was back in the early '90s, that we could not offer our patients much. We were very frequently in the situation that there wasn't a standard of care which we could offer. And we could only sort of endure this daily traumatic experience of telling your patients this news about their fate because in the evenings and at the weekends, we were at the lab bench and we're experiencing the potential science and technology as immunologists, we were aware of what immune therapies could do if you would translate them from bench to bedside, and that was the motivation, why, at some point, we decided we have to contribute to new therapeutic options being translated.

What we learned was this will not work by partnering very early science with pharma. They are not interested in highly innovative, and that means risky innovations and taking them over. But we have to do it ourselves. And that was a reason why, out of desperation, we founded our first company because this was the only way to translate our science into something which could have an impact on patients. And we did not know at that time what this meant, which was, I think, a blessing.

Vlado Perkovic: And you've started, you've clearly created a revolution in terms of the way we approach medicine through mRNA. Now, why didn't you go down that path?

Uğur Şahin: Here, when we were going, in the 90s we discovered an approach to identify tumour antigens, that means structures that are recognised by the immune system of the patient. At that time, the ideal point was to identify the structures and then immunise the patient, and then you have a cancer vaccine, and you can prevent and treat all kinds of cancers. But what we realised early on in our work is that every patient had different antigens so the enthusiasm at the beginning and discovering these antigens were combined was the understanding – we can't just take one antigen because everyone has a different one. So we came up with the idea, we have to do it in a personalised fashion and for personalisation, you need really a platform, yeah?

So we had at that time point, synthetic peptides. And the challenge of synthetic peptide was you have to know the epitopes and the HLA restriction is complicated – it didn't work. We worked with DNA, and DNA was not suitable because of many reasons and then we started this mRNA and the very first experiment that we did in the lab showed us that mRNA could work. This was the early time; it was mid-90s but it was also clear from early studies, that other investigators, is that this mRNA, the power, the potency of this mRNA is 10,000 less than what would be needed to create a powerful immune response. So that was the starting point for doing mRNA research, understanding that the technology in principle could work but understanding also that we have to really, really invest in making that powerful enough.

Vlado Perkovic: So then you started on this long journey. And your initial focus was in the area of it. You're both really trained in cancer, and then COVID hit and the world changed. Most of us worried about various things, but you didn't just worry, you acted. Tell us about that.

Özlem Türeci: So that fateful last weekend of January 2020 when Uğur read the first Lancet article which described a family which contracted COVID-19, and it became clear it can also be asymptomatic but transmissible.

It became clear to us that we were actually already in the midst of a pandemic, which was not apparent, but clearly there. And at that time, we had already invested a lot of efforts in optimising the mRNA platform. We had solved the challenge of low potency, we have solved the challenge of delivery to the right places and the patient, namely into the lymphatic system where you want to have your vaccine. We had solved also the challenge of being fast with manufacturing because already in 2014, we had started our first clinical trials with new epitope vaccines which were individualised, and we've treated more than 400 patients in clinical trials worldwide.

And every of these treatments was a race against that patient's tumour because with personalised vaccines, what you do is you identify the patient's new antigens, you generate the vaccine, and you have to do this with a patient who has a metastatic and growing tumour. And this all meant for us that we had in principle technologies – a technology which was very potent and inducing strong immune responses, T cells and also antibodies. And at the same time, it was very good in being fast with regard to development. And we have a team there, which did this many, many times to develop a vaccine against a newly identified antigen pattern in all our cancer patients.

And this was the reason why we felt the obligation that we should contribute and this was basically instantaneous, this epiphany that we could probably contribute somehow. And we started Project Lightspeed. It was named this way from the very beginning because we wanted to make clear time doesn't matter and one should only accept hurdles which are really given by the law of physics and not due to bureaucracies or other reasons.

Vlado Perkovic: If only the world work that way at a perfect pitch. 

Özlem Türeci: During the pandemic, it did.

Vlado Perkovic: But it didn't for everyone. And there were lots of people working both with mRNA vaccines but also other vaccines, and yet, you know, you've won the race. What were the factors that you think were important in being first?

Uğur Şahin: I think, first of all, it’s really this understanding that we are running into a deadly pandemic. And if you recognise that if you already know that a pandemic is coming in, millions of people are going to die, you ask the question, how can you deal with that? And what we did is, we calculated the minimal time which is needed, and the minimal time is really asking the question, can we do everything parallel? Can we work 24/7? So we asked our co-workers really to come in shifts. And then, we calculated that we came up with around eight months. And of course, at that time point, and we started, the quickest vaccine, which was developed against the new pathogen was, was around five, five and a half, five and a half years. So calculating that, that it can be done in eight months, is of course, something based on thinking and having the commitment and convincing our team to do that.

And at the beginning team, of course, a few days they are required to understand and to accept that everything is going to change, and that they are going to make a vaccine. That was the first step. The second step was to convince decision-makers like regulators. We went to the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut, which is the regulatory authority in Germany, and asked them what they would request if we make a vaccine. And they realised during the conversation, they didn't expect that this will become a pandemic. So as discussed in January, they expected us to come up with the first candidates sometime in December. And then we realised okay, they are not yet ready. Yeah. They had a lot of requests and we need just to continue to work on that.

We courted Pfizer, we had already a collaboration and again, it was the first people we met at that time point. And Pfizer said, “No, we are not so interested in that because there's no evidence that any type of pandemic pathogens had evolved in the past.” But everything changed in March. Yeah, because in March, it was obvious for everyone and at that time point, we had already six weeks. And the six weeks were important to really bring us into a position where we could get four vaccines into clinical testing in April. In July, we had the start of the phase three clinical trial, and then in November, we had the readout. Yeah, and it was exactly the eight months that we had calculated. So if you know that this is possible, and everyone works together and cooperates, it's possible.

Vlado Perkovic: Amazing, that, you know, the power of believing in yourself. And when you see a problem and know it's coming, the impact that starting straightaway can have.. is a wonderful demonstration of that. So, you worked with Pfizer, and you had to work with regulators, not just in Germany and the U.S. but all around the world. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Were there, you know, did people come together to battle this problem? Or were there ongoing bureaucratic hurdles that you had to address? How did you do it?

Uğur Şahin: It was an amazing time. I think everyone, everyone… also here, had to realise how people could work together if there is a common purpose. So usually, for example, a regulator to have a meeting, you wait two months to get a meeting date. So we got the meeting dates in a few days. Yeah. And it was such a fantastic collaboration – the regulator. So submitting the documents two days later, they have already screened, came up with questions and the same with Pfizer.

Pfizer was in New York, we were in Mainz. So there were six hours difference, and we could really work 24/7. Yeah. So we started the day, we worked and then Pfizer came in at noon, and we had the meetings with them. And they continued in the night and when we woke up, they had already additional insights. So it was the best experience that we had in our career, just focused on getting the data, no personal aspects. It was really about data. It was about science.

I remember the day, it was July 24, and we had four candidates, and we had to select one candidate for the phase three clinical trial. And it was on our side about 40 people, on Pfizer's side, 70 people on a media conference and you went to the data, and everyone came to the same conclusion. It has to be BNR one on the 62 B two. So we made the decision on Friday and on Monday, the phase three clinical trial started. So, this is a wonderful experience of scientific collaboration, which is amazing.

Vlado Perkovic: And what are the lessons for us out of that experience? You know, clearly things have, in many ways, happily gone back to what they were before. But in some other ways, some of those old barriers have come back, you know, what are the lessons for you in terms of the way you work that you've really gathered?

Uğur Şahin: Yeah, I think what we all realise is that we are carrying so much overhead, which is unnecessary when we develop a plan B, when we develop treatments for patients. And the key question for us now is, can we do this type of experience also for developing cancer therapies? And how can we reduce the time? How can we ensure that everything is done in the best quality, but still much quicker than it has been traditionally? This was one of the key questions, and unfortunately, the regulators are back to the original time.

Vlado Perkovic: So, bureaucrats are afraid to…

Uğur Şahin: Yeah, yeah.

Vlado Perkovic: And so let's talk about that. Let's talk about your pivot back to cancer. So when did you start thinking, 'Okay, we've got something here, we've dealt with that. Now, let's go back to our original passion.' At what stage of the process did that sort of really become an issue?

Özlem Türeci: Actually, it's not a going back because that cancer work continued. So part of the organisation kept still, this direction of advancing our cancer trials. It's not at the same speed because we all know that the clinical trial ecosystem was also hit hard but not discontinued. And at some point, when all the knockdowns and so on were resolved, we could go full speed, which was two years ago. So we are back to our speed of developing our cancer vaccines and also other immune therapies in cancer for quite some time now.

Vlado Perkovic: And tell us about that vision. What's your vision for the treatment of cancer within therapies you're developing?

Özlem Türeci: So we are immunologists by training. So we really believe in the potential of immune effector mechanisms and immune therapies. And our vision is that we want to serve the needs of patients at an early stage, at a stage where the immune system is still proficient and there's minimal residual disease or no known macroscopically detectable disease at all. In this patient population, we see that in particular personalised cancer vaccines can really make a difference, and this is what we are working on. We are at phase 2 – a stage for a couple of indications, colorectal cancer, for example. We're starting a randomized pancreatic cancer trial with our neoantigen vaccines soon. So, this is the space, and then we have this space of metastatic advanced cancer patients, and here we believe in combination treatments of combining non-immunotherapy approaches and immune-(unintelligible) approaches. For example, we believe that antibody drug conjugates, which have a revival now, are coming back very mature of a first generation ADCs, an important concept which will become a backbone in various cancer indications, and which will replace chemotherapy because we have a targeted version and if you speak to patients who frequently hear, 'Yes, it's chemotherapy,' but it does not view it as such. And we want to combine such backbones which are developing, and we also have our own ADCs with, for example, next-generation immune checkpoint modulators, specific modulators which on the one side work on the T cell and on the other side, work on the antigen-presenting cell. Another space which we find highly interesting, cell therapies, how T cells work, and we see these types of therapies, in particular in metastatic cancer patients.

Vlado Perkovic: It's been great to talk to you both over the course of today. And I've been so impressed of just by your commitment to science, but also by your commitment to equity and making treatments available to all people, wherever they are. How do we address that? In the context of some of these personalised therapies? What does that future look like? Is this going to be a therapy that's available for rich with a different type for people who are less well off? Or is there a way do you think that we can bring this to all the people around the world?

Özlem Türeci: We think, and this is a vision, but everything has to start with a vision, doesn't it? There's this great motto, or mantra, 'I have a dream.' It's not 'I have a project then...' So it has to start, and we believe the origin of an idea, when we started with personalised cancer treatments, was about democratising innovation. And for us, that means back in that time, the targeted therapies like the Herceptin, which we encountered back in those days, that was actually the treatment of the few, the few ones who had the target. And the question was, how can we treat? How can we democratise that? You can only do it with a personalised cancer treatment, which is personal but at the same time universal because you are addressing the common lock of cancer, namely mutations. And so this was the beginning.

The reason why we chose mRNA for our vaccines was that we, at that time, already saw that with the tailwind of innovations in other areas, that would become a technology which would be cost-efficient at some point, and we are seeing that trend very clearly. Then, in the pandemic, we made another experience, namely that, you know, we were very naive, if what we are the ones who have to develop a vaccine, and there are systems which will ensure that there is equality, yeah, and we just need to make sure that we manufacture as much as we can. And we did everything to manufacture as much as we can and we scaled up our manufacturing capacities 300,000 fold during the pandemic, and then we had to learn, no, there is not this overarching authority which ensures that everyone gets a vaccine. We have so many geopolitical, global, ethical and societal challenges which are in the way and we felt the obligation that also here we needed to do something, and the immediate action was to provide actually 40% of what we produced and, if I'm correct, at cost to low and middle-income countries, which is not sustainable long-term.

So the second step was that we wanted to enable those regions to produce for themselves COVID-19 vaccines, but also anything else which may come in the future. And this gave rise to a project which we called ‘BioNTainer,’ which are basically container modules of miniaturised production facilities for mRNA. And this started again as a dream, but everyone was so motivated to not show people who starve a picture of a fish, but help them catch their own fish. So that's a principle that we managed to build these BioNTainer systems. The first BioNTainer systems have been delivered to Kigali, Rwanda, and we have initiated an office here. And the dream is that people in Africa can produce the COVID-19 vaccine for Africa. And it will be a long path, but we can imagine that at some point, they could even produce their individualised cancer vaccines for basically their own regions. So this is a pathway which we think could work to help contribute to equity and equality.

Vlado Perkovic: Fantastic. It's wonderful to see you taking on all of those elements because sometimes scientists think their role is just to do the science. But actually, if we want to have an impact, you can't ignore that context around it. And you've obviously done that not only with energy but with success, which is fabulous. So I'm keen to give people in the audience an opportunity to ask questions, but maybe just one last question for me. You both started as scientists, as clinicians; there are many of those in the room tonight, people who have spent their whole careers working in similar areas but without your impact. Based on what you've learned, what's your advice to them?

Uğur Şahin: I think one important learning is if you really have an idea and you believe in this idea, you can just be relentless in pursuing that. And so for us, it is again and again learning that you have an idea, you have a concept. And on the one side, if you're good scientists, you are critical and you are questioning whether this idea is going to work. And as long as you are still believing that this is going to work, continue that. And then one day, you get to the point and see, 'Wow, this works.' And being consequent is, I think, the most important aspect.

Many times, many times, we have never disappointment when we did something; we’d only disappointment when we didn't do it, or we didn't do it as fast as we could do it. And this is something, one of the key topics that we are seeing and asking the question, how can we do it faster.

Vlado Perkovic: Fantastic.

Özlem Türeci: And I think what I would like to add to that is also in the pandemic, we have observed that scientists and physicians have to take over responsibility in a radical way. So even for non-scientific problems and challenges, we sometimes as scientists would back and think there are other experts to deal with this. And that is non-scientific challenge. But we should be courageous where we can do it. And sometimes we might be able to even contribute more because we are coming from the outside with the wish to make an impact.

Vlado Perkovic: Fantastic. Okay, well, let's open it up for questions. What I'm going to ask people to do is put their hand up; we're going to have some microphones around the room. And before you ask your question, please introduce yourself and perhaps tell us where you're from. Let’s start.

Audience member 1: My name is Minoti Apte. I'm a professor of medicine here but interested in pancreatic cancer research. So, I certainly read your most recent Nature Medicine paper. But my question is a bit different. So I was really impressed by your entrepreneurship. When in your young days, you founded your own company. And I was wondering, what are the three main things you might advise our youngsters if they wanted to go down that route?

Uğur Şahin: The first advice is, don't start too early. Because once you have started your company, and once you get money into the company, expectations start and we know in life sciences, regardless of whether you do it in lightspeed, it takes time, so really prolong as much as possible. So that would be the first advice. What's your advice?

Özlem Türeci: Yeah, and the second one would be what I just said earlier, radical accountability. Don't expect that if you hire a professional pharma CEO or whatever for your company, that they know how it has to be done. Your science is what drives the concept you want to develop; it also should drive the business model, so that you have an important part in that.

Uğur Şahin: And the third one is work with people you trust.

Audience member 2: Hi, thank you both for sharing your journey. My name is Associate Professor Holly Seale. I'm a behavioural scientist and work with WHO and governments and other organisations at the other end of the vaccine journey. So, this is around supporting acceptance to trying to get the vaccine into arms. What we know historically is that having a vaccine available doesn't necessarily equate to uptake and unfortunately, even during COVID, even what you were saying about the emergency and the urgency, we were still seeing populations not necessarily accepting the vaccine. And so I wonder, as a social scientist, how do we break down the silos? How do we, as a group who kind of almost comes in at the tail end sometimes, actually starts to work with companies like yours, right back at the development space, at that idea generation space, so that we can then adequately prime communities to say, there is this wonderful vaccine coming along for cancer. This is the technology that's been used. This is a technology that, you know, will generate this new vaccine. How do we break down those silos, because we're not doing that at the moment?

Özlem Türeci: So, there are many reasons and different reasons why different communities and subsets of the population are vaccine-hesitant. So, there is not one response or one solution to it. We think it's important to be very transparent and educate, and start with this early on, which is difficult if you are in a pandemic. Also, for example, media and politicians and so on need to learn how to communicate in a way that trust is built, right? So, we as scientists also have an obligation that we have with this communication, that we break down into language, which can be understood by the different target populations, the risks, the opportunities, and bring them into balance in the way we present. And with regard, for example, to low and middle-income countries, when it comes to equality, we have experienced that there is even more hesitancy because how does it look that we sort of give away the vaccine to African countries, for example? And that was one of the reasons why we thought we have to enable people so that they are empowered by it. That's also part of it. This again goes back to, for example, Western populations; it might not be a good idea to force people to get vaccinated because again, it creates anxiety and distrust.

Vlado Perkovic: Let's go to the left, and then down the front here.

Audience member 3: Hello, again, Alex Swarbrick from the Garvan Institute and a conjoint Professor here at UNSW. The scientific ecosystem can be very risk-averse. But clearly, you took a major risk when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. I'm really fascinated by that decision-making. What made you so convinced to take that risk? How did you mitigate against it? And I guess I'm intrigued to understand what if it hadn't worked out? What did you really bet the house on, on that vaccine?

Özlem Türeci: To your last question. Yes, we bet the house. So, I mean, the day at which I had the highest level of anxiety in my whole life was the day when we were waiting for the phase 3 results because then being negative on a macro level meant that, I mean, there were not so many companies left at that time who were successful, who had phase 3 trials running even right on the macro level, that would have meant that we could not contribute to vaccine supply. And it would have meant that it would be even farther away to start to vaccinate on a micro level. It meant that it could have cost us the company and the existence of our family at the end of the day. So it was a risky decision when we started to focus and also make investments at risk, because we had to, for example, already plan and yet install the phase 3 trial at a point where we were not even sure whether we would have a candidate on the phase 3 trial, but this is what you have to do when you are desperate to plan for success and do everything for success. We had a very clear motivation to do all this because we were convinced that this would be a pandemic and millions of people would die, and the world would change. So this was a high motivation. And we needed risk management and mitigation. This was also clear, so that we basically had trigger points where we decided for the next big investment or the next important decision, which we would take, based on observations we were to make.

Audience member 4: I’m Chris Goodnow part of the many institutes that are affiliated with the University. It’s a real privilege to have you part of the university families. I’m an immunologist and keenly aware of the mixture of science and magic that makes your vaccine so immunogenic.

We get very firsthand experience comparing other ways of formulating. And so I wanted to explore that concept of immunogenicity because as an immunologist, I’m always keenly aware of my failings, that we understand something about immunogenicity, but the amount we understand versus the amount we don't understand is huge. And yet it's core to what made your vaccine successful, you know, the toll-like receptors set in and things clearly enabling, but there's much more that makes a lipid nanoparticles immunogenic. And I'm just wondering, how did you navigate that path between some bits that are known and some bits that have to be solved empirically to stay at lightspeed?

Uğur Şahin: Actually, the beauty of mRNA vaccines is once you have a solution, and you can exchange the message. We have invested more than 20 years of research in understanding how immunogenicity works, and essentially, you can describe it or reduce it to three parameters. One is that the messenger RNA is translated long enough; yeah, you really need the protein. And the second is you need the protein at the right cells in dendritic cells. What we accomplished is to target the mRNA directly to lymph node dendritic cells.

They are taking up them. And this creates one of the learnings from early experiment was mainly injected mRNA to the skin; it didn't work nicely. But then we injected the mRNA directly into a lymph node; we could reduce the dose thousandfold. So the question was, of course, you can't inject that into the lymph node in a vaccine setting. The question was how to build the nanoparticle in a way that the nanoparticles have access to the lymph node.

Many people believe that if you get the vaccine into the arm, that the muscle cells make the protein and muscle cells make little protein and they don't contribute to immunogenicity. The contribution to immunogenicity as needing their delivery to the dendritic cells and the prolonged expression dendritic cells with the immune adjuvant stimulation. And this was this was the learning and we knew that this is going to work because we have tested many, many other antigens. And for cancer immunotherapy, we even need strong immune responses. So the COVID vaccine is in using strong immune response. But for the cancer vaccine, you really need profound the higher immune responses because it's a top politic vaccine and you have the immune system has to fight billions of tumour cells. So therefore, the repeated application is important there. So this is the third component, repeated application, which contributes to the high immunogenicity.

Audience member 5: Yes, I'm Professor Pall Thordarson, lead chemistry here and a director of the UNSW RNA Institute. I also have been a member of the Australian Centre for Nanomedicine here for over 10 years. So, lots of experience in nanomedicine, and we've been dreaming about seeing personalised medicine work for decades like you. I guess my question to you is that now what you learned from the COVID epidemic, and where we are now the final bottlenecks to really roll out personalised medicine and should still on the basic immunology and clinician clinical science? Is it the manufacturing because I know are there issues are still delivery systems or is it though mainly in the regulatory space?

Uğur Şahin: So firstly we believe that it's a matter of proving that this type of vaccines work. So we have created evidence in a number of different types of tumours; the early evidence was in melanoma, we have evidence in triple negative breast cancer. We created some evidence in pancreatic cancer.

And the first case two clinical trials are starting. And what we need to do now is to go into registrational trials, where we compare the vaccine against standard of care or vaccine plus standard of care versus standard of care. And we have pretty confident that in the, in the, in the settings that Özlem described, where we have a minimal residual disease and cancer is actually you can see cancer in two ways you can see cancer as an advanced disease in patients with metastatic disease, or you can see the problem in a completely different way. And you can see it in a way that most of the people who get cancer, get surgery and about 30%, 40% of patients after three or four years and get metastatic relapses. So, if you redefine the problem in a way, how can I prevent metastatic relapses after surgery, then it becomes a matter of personalised cancer vaccines. So we believe that is going to come. It will require a few years for first trials to be positive legislation trials, we believe in 2030, we would be will have at least in two or three indications person has cancer vaccines, and the decade from 2030 to 2040, will be more or less a roll out of personalised cancer vaccines and many cancer indications. So we don't see a major technological limitations, also the manufacturing will become more and more cost effective. And we are now building a factory from making vaccines for about 10,000 patients a year. We are thinking about effectively for 100,000 patients and if you can do in a personalised manner. And if you can do it for 100,000 patients, it should also be possible to do it for a million patients a year. So it's about making a smaller, smaller, smaller and so personally, I don't see any problem to be saw.

Vlado Perkovic: That’s what we all like to hear. At the back, Steve, and then we got a question towards the front.

Audience member 6: Thanks very much. So, Stephen Rodda, Pro Vice Chancellor of Industry and Innovation here at UNSW. There's two parts to my question. One is that you said in February, you approached Pfizer. And they said we don’t believe there's a pandemic coming. But yet by March they did. How did that phone call go when Pfizer come back to you? 

Laughter

And the second part of the question is a global behemoth of Pfizer. How did you find that interaction and dynamic of working with such a big company, such as Pfizer.

Uğur Şahin: Yeah, I have only positive things to say about Pfizer. So, first of all, when we called in favor of it, you have just to imagine the situation. So, a small biotech is calling Pfizer. It was a non-validated technology. And telling that this is going to become a pandemic. And suggesting to develop a vaccine in the pandemic to address the pandemic. And, at Pfizer, we had a very, very experienced colleague, and he said, no step back. And, and was all the good arguments, because the person who was on the call was an experienced person and having dealt with flu epidemics for many years. Yep. So, it was the rational, experience-based answer. And it was not the answer based on calculations. So, we did just our math. Yeah. And understood that this will become a pandemic. But if you are driven by experience, of course, you don't expect that in your lifetime now, a pandemic happens. And four weeks later, in March, we did a second call. And this time another person was on the call, Kathrin Jansen, who's the Head of Cancer… Infectious Disease Vaccine, and I started the conversation, “Kathrin, you might know that we are working on an infectious disease on our COVID vaccine. And we thought that it could be a time that you join us”, and she said, “Uğur, of course.”

Özlem Türeci: At that time dead bodies were piling up in front of Pfizer.

Uğur Şahin: And it was a really wonderful experience to work with Pfizer and one of the biggest fears that we had is that Pfizer is taking over and then deciding to stop or not to cooperate. No, it was a really fantastic, it was an amazing collaboration. And everyone they had fantastic people with experience in 30 years of manufacturing and we were sticking together and discussing how we can scale up from 1.3 billion that we wanted to produce and ended up with 3 billion doses that we produce in 2025. And this is only possible if you really come together and work in such amazing manner together.

Vlado Perkovic: So we got time for one last question, I think.

Audience member 7: Thank you for this for the great talk. I am an international student here at UNSW and a PhD student at the Garvan Institute, one of the associated institutes here. I also like to call myself an immunologist... an immunology question is, how did you guys deal with the data sharing or the data security around this? Because I bet this Pfizer will have a military-grade security infrastructure, and you guys are really passionate about your own research. So talking about colleagues here and there, or how was the email interactions. What do you guys learn from that period when you were dealing with something so delicate as the COVID vaccine?

Uğur Şahin: So you mean data sharing in respect to protection of knowledge? Yeah, so what we did during the pandemic is we really published every piece of information that we had in preprint journals. So we uploaded the information. So the way how we produced the vaccine is public, even before the pandemic, we share this information. So we really believe that what you do should be should be recapitulated. And by sharing the information also, the clinical data gets the experts the opportunity to assess whether the vaccine works and how well the vaccine works. And it's fantastic. It is this collaboration of the scientific community, where you would just share your paper and your data on a preprint server and the experts in the world start to look at the data and answer questions.

I believe the future must be in displaying, continuing to display, don't try to protect what you're doing. Just share it. And by sharing it, you can convince scientists and new people can join the company and get collaboration partners. I think it's a new time where technology is evolving so fast that it doesn't make sense to protect your technology, because it's getting old in one year. And then you are just protecting something which is not any more relevant.

Vlado Perkovic: So Uğur, Özlem, thank you so much. It's been an amazing evening. We are out of time, unfortunately. But it's been fantastic to hear about not just the work that you've done, but the spirit in which you've done it, the openness, the transparency, the partnership, the human-centric, the willingness to take a risk and pursue it single-mindedly and without reservation. And the incredible impact that's had.

I'd just like to close with three reflections. The first is, you know, one of the things about preventative medicine, things like vaccines, in the COVID context is that they say the people who've been prevented from having an illness never know they've been prevented from having an illness. And in this case, the people whose deaths were prevented by having the vaccine will never know that that was the case, specifically. But it's quite possible that many of the people in this room may have had their deaths prevented through the work that you've done, along with many millions of other people around the room. And for that, on behalf of all of us, we thank you.

The second reflection is that, you know, it's rare that you get to spend time in the company of people who have present prevented millions of deaths. In fact, it's probably unprecedented. I don't know that, you know, I can't think of any other situation where we could say we've, you know, you could go and talk to someone that has prevented millions of deaths, clearly you have and through your work.

And it's incredible to see that you're not resting on your laurels. But now you're turned back to your primary passion. And I have no doubt that you're going to succeed and on behalf of all of us, again, wish you all the best in that endeavour and look forward to working with you and finding ways to support you in the work that you're doing. And finally, we are very proud to have you as a member of our family now. But being a member of our family comes with responsibilities and obligations. 

Laughter

And you must visit your family regularly; it is one of those, and of course, we would love to have you back anytime you wish to come and look forward to continuing to have you as part of our family and an ever-closer part of our family. So thank you again so much, and congratulations on your honorary doctorates.

Uğur Şahin: Thank you.

UNSW Centre for Ideas: Thanks for listening. For more information, visit unswcentreforideas.com. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.