Two doctors’ spouses are behind the upcoming Pfizer vaccine .. what are their stories?

Eyes and hopes have become attached to the new vaccine for Kurna to control the pandemic that has killed more than a million people around the world, and in the midst of this anticipation, a married couple appeared in a form of hope for all, as the medical spouses Ugur Shaheen and Ozlem Toriichi are standing behind the expected vaccine for the Corona virus, which can change the world. 

Shaheen is the CEO of the German biotechnology company “Biontech”, and his wife is a member of the company’s board of directors, to form a dream team, and the world is pinning them on their hopes for a vaccine for the virus, according to the British Daily Mail, especially with their company announcing that its joint vaccine with “Pfizer” has achieved efficacy beyond 90%. Shaheen was born in Turkey and raised in Germany, where his parents worked at the Ford plant. According to Al Qabas.

After being trained as a physician, he became a professor and researcher focusing on immunotherapy, working in teaching hospitals in Cologne and the southwestern city of Hamburg, and there he met Miss Toriichi, who stood next to him while completing his academic career, as medical research and oncology were a common passion between them. Toriichi, the daughter of a Turkish doctor who immigrated to Germany, said in a previous interview that both of them set aside time to work in the laboratory, on their wedding day, explaining that together they had hone the immune system as a potential ally in fighting cancer, and tried to address the unique genetic makeup of each tumor. 

Start of the road

The couple started life as entrepreneurs in 2001, with the creation of the biotech company “Ganymed”, with the aim of developing antibodies to fight cancer, but Shaheen, who was at the time a professor at the University of Mainz, never gave up academic research and education, so he sold the company to “Astellas” »Japanese in 2016 for 1.4 billion dollars. In 2008, the couple co-founded the company “BioNTech”, with the aim of pursuing a much wider range of cancer immunotherapy tools, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invested $ 55 million in them to work on HIV and TB programs. 

Despite his wealth and the huge returns the company is achieving, Shaheen’s colleagues assert that he is calm and balanced and avoids checking the company’s share price, and instead is more interested in scientific readings. Matthias Kromaire, a member of the board of directors of the venture capital company MIG AG, said that despite his achievements, He has never changed from being modest and elegant.

“Pfizer” and “Biontech” announced that the vaccine against Covid-19 that they are developing is “90% effective”, after preliminary analysis of the results of the third phase of clinical trials, which is the last before submitting its license application.

The two companies said in a joint statement that “this effectiveness of the vaccine” was measured by comparing the number of participants who were infected with the emerging coronavirus in the group that received the vaccine and the number of infected people in another group who received a placebo vaccine, “seven days after receiving the second dose” and 28 days after receiving The first dose, according to Agence France-Presse.

“This is the best news that can be for the world, the United States, and public health,” said William Gruber, vice president of Pfizer for clinical research and development of vaccines, and said it was even better than the best result he had hoped for, according to Bloomberg.