Perseverance, courage and humility. These are the necessary ingredients when doing research, three elements that guide the work of many scientists every day and that have been the compass of Ugur Sahin e Ozlem Tureci when they had the intuition of the vaccine that would revolutionize the lives of all of us, as we fought the battle against Covid 19.
It was January 24, 2020 when immunologist Uğur Şahin read of a new respiratory disease that was dangerously spreading in Wuhan, China. He would never have imagined that the news, relegated to the scientific pages of the “Spiegel”, would have changed the life of the entire community.
In the small company they had founded together with Özlem Türeci, BioNTech, for years they had been conducting studies on a molecule that until then had not aroused the interest of researchers called mRNA o messenger RNAto develop its potential to fight cancer.
When Covid-19 became a tragic reality for the whole world, Uğur and Özlem came up with the idea of applying their research to building an effective vaccine. A tiring, impervious path that in nine months led to the creation, in partnership with Pfizer, of the first approved vaccine against the coronavirus.
Three years later, we retrace those stages, on the occasion of an important ceremony that took place at theAcademy of the Lincei in Romein the presence of the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella, the conferment of the Feltrinelli 2023 international award for medicine a Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci.
Today new challenges are opening up for the two scientists, their research has expanded the study of therapeutic messenger RNA vaccines against cancer that could be available within this decade.
We met Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci on the sidelines of the ceremony and we asked them important questions.
Your research has focused on the study of the immune system and the development of various therapeutic modalities such as mRNA technology against cancer long before the outbreak of the pandemic and the development of a vaccine against Covid 19. It is true that by 2030 we can hope for mRNA-based therapies against cancer?
“Yes, we and other scientists are developing cancer vaccines so the results of clinical trials are encouraging and if things continue in this way we expect that by 2030 mRNA-based vaccines could be available for some cancer patients”.
These are therapeutic vaccines for treating cancer, not for preventing the disease. What will be the most curable tumors according to your studies?
“Yes, that’s right, that’s correct, it’s about vaccines that can be used once the tumor is already presentwe are doing studies on different types of cancer including melanomail colorectal cancer and also the pancreatic cancer. These could be the first types of cancers for which cancer vaccines could reach patients. First of all, it is necessary to make a selection by type of tumor, then carry out the clinical study with hundreds of patients for that type of tumor and, once the data have been collected which show that that vaccine works compared to the standard of care for that type of tumor, then we have approval for that type of patient who can receive the vaccine”.
How will these personalized vaccines work and what are the differences from the one against Covid-19?
“These personalized vaccines they are targeted so that once a patient has been diagnosed with cancer a sample of their tumor will be taken to identify the molecular characteristics of that patient’s cancer. The vaccine will then be specific to those cancer cells and will be different for each individual patient because each patient has a unique cancer and these characteristics will be used to develop an mRNA-based vaccine. This means that each patient will therefore have a different composition relating to their tumor. As for the Covid vaccine, however, all people were vaccinated with the same Covid vaccine “.
The Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei has decided to award your research with the Feltrinelli International Prize for Medicine. What does this recognition mean to you and what are your goals, your future dreams?
“This recognition is a great honor for us, we feel privileged, it is one of the most important Italian awards and we remembered the first days of Covid 19, when Italy was hit very hard by the pandemic. We feel the responsibility to continue our research and we will dedicate ourselves to continue our research on mRNA vaccines for infectious diseases, for example for malaria, for tuberculosis and of course to find new cancer treatments. There are millions of people who lose their lives every year from these diseases”.
At what stage are the trials for this type of vaccine?
“Experiments are already underway. We have already treated hundreds of patients with vaccines. Clinical trials take a long time in oncology and you need to have a certain number of patients. We have very promising experience. The trials involve 3 phases: phase 1, 2 and 3. We are currently in phase 2 of the clinical trials”.
“Courage makes you fall in love with the unknown. Galileo Galilei once said that he loved the stars too much to be afraid of the night. Our stars are the immune system and technologies such as mRNA, antibodies and many other elements that we see glow in the dark. We dare to explore the universe, we want to understand all the mechanisms and functions to be able to use them for our patients. Even the search for the anti-Covid vaccine was a search in an unfamiliar and unbeaten territory but courage is what gives us wings, our curiosity is our wings, our creativity” recalled Özlem Türeci after the award ceremony.
“Early in our career we decided to focus onmRNA as the cornerstone of our vision for immunotherapy personalized anticancer and we decided to do this despite the fact that there was also some skepticism in the scientific community. mRNA used to be considered a bit like the ugly duckling, however we know that beauty can also be found in unexpected places” explained Uğur Şahin.