How BioNTech’s Husband-and-Wife Team Developed Pfizer’s Vaccine

TOKYO — When Ugur Sahin, co-founder of the German biotech company BioNTech, first picked up an article published in January in the Lancet medical journal about a mysterious virus in Wuhan, he told his wife and business partner Ozlem Tureci that he expected it to spread to Germany by April.

By March, schools and kindergartens in most German states had been shut to slow the coronavirus spread.

This week, BioNTech and its collaborator, U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, announced that the vaccine developed by Sahin and his team was well tolerated in final-phase human trials, and is more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 — the disease caused by the coronavirus that has killed 1.2 million people around the world. Read more…..