The doctors behind the first approved vaccine for COVID-19 are testing cancer medicines that could revolutionize treatment of a disease that has been a scourge for centuries, they said in remarks at a Downtown conference Thursday and Friday.
Ozlem Tureci, who with husband Ugur Sahin co-founded German pharmaceutical company BioNTech SE, said Friday during the Precision Medicine World Conference that the company had two therapies in proof of concept trials that rely on the same tool, mRNA technology, that is used in the company’s highly effective COVID-19 vaccine.
One of the therapies is designed to be an “off the shelf” cancer treatment for tumors with a similar genetic makeup. The second is a therapy that will match individual tumor characteristics to create a medicine tailored to the patient.
Even cancers of the same organ — lungs for example — differ among patients with the same disease, Dr. Sahin said. New individualized treatments will cost more, but costs will come down with advancements in automation.
“Once we have a toolbox, we can ask what part of the toolbox can be repurposed,” Dr. Sahin said during a recorded interview with UPMC breast cancer researcher Adrian Lee, who is director of the Institute for Precision Medicine. “We have a very strong immune response in advanced cancer care. We have a powerful platform.”
Drs. Tureci and Sahin and Julie A. Johnson, dean of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, were honored for their work on Thursday. The Precision Medicine Institute is a collaboration between the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC.
The conference was winding up the same day the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention overruled a recommendation by an advisory panel that had declined to endorse COVID-19 booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for front-line workers. The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices on Thursday recommended booster shots for many Americans, but excluded health care workers, teachers and others whose jobs put them at higher risk of getting infected.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said allowing booster shots for health care and other front-line workers would “best serve the nation’s public health needs.”
BioNTech’s mRNA breakthrough technology, which builds on 20 years of research, created a new pharmaceutical class of drugs for the treatment of disease, but that only happened after decades of scientific doubt, said Donald M. Yealy, chief medical officer at UPMC.
“Everybody thought it was a dead end,” Dr. Yealy said in introducing Drs. Sahin and Tureci on Thursday. “It always, always, always, always disappointed you.”
In accepting the institute’s award, Dr. Tureci, 54, said precision medicine had been the “focus for my career and particularly close to our hearts.”
“Each and every patient is treated with a new tumor composition,” she said. Added Dr. Sahin, 55, “There is now a huge opportunity to build on the success of this technology.”
Synthetic mRNA molecules, which are the blueprints for making proteins that attack viruses, are injected into the arm and drawn to the patient’s lymph tissue. There, dendritic cells use the “blueprints” to make antigens that go after the virus.
The elegance of BioNTech’s technology is that the mRNA blueprints get priority within the cell for the manufacture of the antigens. “We have a new era of RNAs,” Dr. Lee said.
And the newly created antigens do their job: The typical flu vaccine is between 50% and 70% effective; BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine exceeds 90% effectiveness.
BioNTech, founded in 2008 by Drs. Sahin and Tureci, had been focusing on making cancer vaccines, but pivoted in January 2020 to developing a COVID-19 vaccine using mRNA technology. It was the first mRNA vaccine to be approved, which opened an entirely new field for vaccine research.
This year, the company anticipated making 3 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccine, Dr. Sahin said.
BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine was also the fastest development of a vaccine since Edward Jenner inoculated his gardener’s son with cowpox in 1796. The next fastest record was set in the 1960s for the mumps vaccine, which took four years.
Creating an mRNA cancer treatment that’s tailored to the individual patient could take as little as a few weeks, BioNTech officials have said.
UPMC’s Dr. Lee called the years of BioNTech’s mRNA research and development of the COVID-19 vaccine a “little bit of a science fiction story.”
At home, there’s no wall between science and their personal lives, Dr. Sahin said, where the couple and their children talk about their work, medicine and biology over meals.
“We don’t need to separate it,” he said. “We are a science family. We live it. We just mix it up.”
“I see this as an extreme privilege of life to live at this time.”
Kris B. Mamula: kmamula@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1699
First Published: September 24, 2021, 6:17 p.m.
