BERLIN — It was over breakfast on the wintry morning of January 24 that Ozlem Tureci and her husband Ugur Sahin decided, “we need to fire the starting gun on this.”
Sahin “had concluded from a publication describing coronavirus cases in Wuhan… that there was a high probability that a pandemic could be imminent,” Tureci recounted.
The decision by the couple, founders of a small German company called BioNTech, gave birth to Operation Lightspeed — in which the scientists in the company diverted all their resources from cancer therapy research to finding a vaccine to stop COVID-19.
“Since that day… there has not been a day when we took a break from working on this project,” said …
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