Security quote of the week [LWN.net]

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 17, 2021 14:29 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Security quote of the week by Wol
Parent article: Security quote of the week

The idea of mRNA-based vaccines is almost as old as the discovery of mRNA itself. It's certainly something that various academic research groups and pharmaceutical companies have been spending considerable amounts of time and money on over the years. For example, BioNTech, the German company behind the “Pfizer vaccine” was founded more than a decade ago by two oncologists who wanted to work on mRNA-based cancer therapy (and prevention); in early 2020, they basically put what they'd been doing on hold to apply their pre-existing vaccine technology to SARS-CoV-2. (I've read somewhere that once they'd received the SARS-CoV-2 genome, it took BioNTech two days to come up with a number of likely vaccine candidates, and the rest of the time was spent on picking the best of those, pre-clinical and clinical testing, and getting regulatory approval.) They're back to working on the anti-cancer stuff now, too, and thanks to their COVID vaccine efforts, funding for that is unlikely to be a problem anytime soon.

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Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 17, 2021 17:08 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

> was founded more than a decade ago by two oncologists who wanted to work on mRNA-based cancer therapy

ie after this lady near bankrupted herself.

Not to downplay what BioNTech have done (I think my mum invested in them), but they were building on earlier research.

Cheers,
Wol

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 19, 2021 10:12 UTC (Sun) by gezza (subscriber, #40700) [Link] (1 responses)

See Sam's link below. Turns out that BioNTech licensed the tech from with Katalin Karikó and later recruited her. Interesting read.

Security quote of the week

Posted Sep 24, 2021 14:13 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

People who believe that Katalin Karikó hasn't been getting the credit due to her will be pleased to hear that in 2022, she, along with her BioNTech colleagues Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci will be awarded the Paul-Ehrlich-und-Ludwig-Darmstaedter-Preis (the most prestigious prize for medical research in Germany) for their work on mRNA technology. The awards committee explicitly cited their basic research rather than their work on the Comirnaty COVID-19 vaccine. Various recipients of this award have gone on to win the Nobel prize for medicine, too, so that's not entirely out of the question, either.