BioNTech founders share plans to address vaccine inequity at Qatar Foundation’s WISH 2022 – The Peninsula

BioNTech founders share plans to address vaccine inequity at Qatar Foundation’s WISH 2022 – The Peninsula

Doha: Developing the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, strategies to address vaccine inequity, the challenges of technology transfer, and the progress on vaccines for other diseases were some of the topics discussed in a plenary session at World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH) 2022 on Thursday.

The session featured Prof. Ozlem Tureci, M.D. and Prof. Ugur Sahin, co-founders of German startup company BioNTech. The discussion started with Prof. Sahin recounting some of their earliest reactions to news of the virus spreading around the world. "We realized early on that the outbreak in Wuhan would become a global threat and a global pandemic," he said.

According to Dr. Sahin, there were two main factors behind their success in developing the first mRNA vaccine to treat COVID-19: "One was that we had new technology, the mRNA, that allows us to make a vaccine extremely quickly. The second aspect was that we knew that our technology can induce extremely strong immune responses, and that is what you need in a pandemic outbreak situation - a technology that can allow you to come up with a vaccine while the pandemic is ongoing."

The speakers shared how all the stakeholders involved in vaccine development came together and went beyond their standard