The day for the breakthroughs, the most prominent of the scientific breakthroughs, began with a standing ovation. Special applause for the Mainz doctor and researcher Özlem Türeci. This apparently not only expressed her participation as co-founder of BioNTech and thus the bowing of the audience in front of the historic breakthrough associated with the approval of the first mRNA vaccine in the Covid-19 pandemic. There was also a lot of gratitude to be felt. Your vaccine changed the world, and it is believed that it has already saved millions of lives. Türeci and her husband and partner at BioNTech, the immunologist Ugur Sahin, were the lighthouses in an illustrious series of health and social researchers who made the relevance of scientific excellence particularly tangible at the Falling Walls Conference.

Joachim Müller-Jung

Editor in the features section, responsible for the “Nature and Science” section.

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However, as simple as it sounds at first glance - science can heal - it is not as simple as it is in medical research, which has already been automated in many ways. Health is important to everyone, but scientifically it is still not a precursor. Türeci put it in a nutshell: “To tear down walls, you have to be prepared.” The BioNTech couple's long journey on the way to mRNA success began in the early 1990s with the development of cancer vaccines. The idea was to develop tailor-made tumor therapies tailored to the individual patient. The genetic data of the tumor are obtained, a vaccine is constructed that contains the corresponding information in the biochemical copy - the mRNA - and it is ensured that this genetically programmed information reaches the patient's body,where the cancer building block generated from it stimulates the immune system to defend itself.

A brilliant plan in theory. Programmable tools that practically initiate self-healing. The problem: mRNA, the little sister and scout of the crucial gene with the assembly instructions, is broken down in the body so quickly without protection that it is hardly effective. Türeci vividly described how many hurdles, walls, so to speak, had to be overcome before the concept was ripe for clinical trials. “Molecular engineering”, the genetic optimization through chemical design, was the main task for many years. First it was a matter of increasing the amount of the protein programmed in the mRNA a thousandfold, then came the "body hack": It had to be ensured that the protein, which is now protected from degradation, gets to the right cells in the right place.Such so-called dendritic cells wait in the lymph nodes to be used. After all, it came down to speeding up and scaling up the vaccine. Seven years ago it took three to five months to produce the amount of vaccine required for mRNA cancer immunotherapy; five years later it was just under three to five weeks.

Education has to get better

It took almost two generations for the idea of ​​cancer immunotherapy with mRNA to develop into a concept that now seemed not only clinically - albeit experimentally - applicable, but was even recognized as a general new vaccination principle. The breakthrough did not come in tumor research, of course, but with the global misfortune of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Describing this rocky scientific career was important to Türeci because it was important to her what came up again and again in many falling walls debates about medical advances: breakthroughs can rarely be precisely planned, but above all they almost never come overnight. On the contrary: In health research in particular, it is important to create “scientific ecosystems” in which good ideas can only flourish. What is meant are networkswhich can also help in solving the problem beyond the actual subject area - in this case immunology.