In one of the busiest periods in medical history, they managed to turn a distant dream into a useful corona vaccine in just 11 months.
Now the couple behind the German pharmaceutical company BioNTech are hoping the mRNA technology can also be used in new treatments for skin, colon and other cancers, which may be present as early as 2030.
This is what the two said in one interview with the BBC on Sunday 16 October.
Other discoveries in the laboratory
Scientific couple Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci explain how the mRNA technology of the new corona vaccine can be used to train the immune system to attack cancer cells instead of viral proteins.
They say they are already testing cancer vaccines in the lab, which has reinforced their belief that a product could be available as early as 2030.
‘As scientists, we are always reluctant to say we have a cure for cancer. But we have some findings that we will continue to work on, “BioNTech’s head of research Özlem Türeci told BBC reporter Laura Kuenssberg.
‘Mug shot’ for the immune system
New experimental cancer treatments were the reason the German couple founded the pharmaceutical company in 2008.
Since then, they have specialized in immunotherapy, which trains the immune system to fight cancer cells, using, among other things, mRNA molecules.
Therefore, they were already well underway when the coronavirus spread around the world in the spring of 2020.
Together with the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, they made the first mRNA vaccine, which uses mRNA molecules to send some kind of blueprint into our cells with genetic instructions to build a protein on the surface of the virus, the so-called spike protein. .
Vaccines, for example, act as a kind of ‘mosquito net’, making it easier for our immune systems to recognize and defeat the virus.
The pandemic opens the way
According to the pair, the same approach could be used to stimulate our immune systems to make antibodies and T cells against proteins on the surface of tumors.
The goal is to tailor vaccines to individual patients, so that, for example, after an operation they receive a vaccine that can detect and destroy remaining cancer cells.
But there are still many bears on the road, because cancer cells can be covered with a wide variety of proteins, which makes developing a vaccine that targets them and ignores healthy body tissues a huge challenge.
But according to Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, the corona pandemic actually made them faster to produce new vaccines and provided a lot of insight into the human immune system’s response to mRNA.
This knowledge “will certainly accelerate the development of our cancer vaccines,” they tell the BBC.
