This year has been like a scary film that nobody wanted to watch and all of us were desperately waiting for a vaccine that can cure COVID-19. Recently, the UK became the first country to finally authorize the use of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine for its citizens. 

Now, people in the UK are the first ones to get vaccinated and the team that made this happen are the founders of BioNTech. Their team consists of husband and wife physicians Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci. 

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When they got to know in the month of January that COVID-19 can spread across the world making it a full-grown pandemic, the couple started working towards a cure. 

The couple is the children of Turkish migrants and got married to each other in the year 2002. Sahin graduated and became a doctor from the University of Cologne in 1990. Tureci became a doctor after earning a medicine degree at the Saarland University Faculty of medicine in Homburg, Germany. 

The couple was actually working to cure cancer but ended up making a COVID-19 vaccine. They were working at Mainz University Hospital where they were investigating if the immune system could be trained to kill the cancerous cells.

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It became extremely difficult for them to get funding, so they decided to start their own company in 2001. Then they started testing antibody therapies against cancer and later sold the company to a Japanese pharmaceutical giant Astellas for 1.4 billion Euros in 2016.

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They found BioNTech in 2008 with an Austrian oncologist Christoph Huber and started working on developing immunotherapy treatments for cancer.

Pfizer had already worked with BioNTech in the past to make a flu vaccine. So as soon as they found out that the team was planning to make the COVID-19 vaccine, they decided to collaborate.

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