Image: Raimond Spekking [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Flickr
Özlem Türeci says change needed in R&D funding, biotech ecosystems and regulations for European leadership
Europe needs to improve “many things” to be a leader in breakthrough technologies, according to one of the pioneers behind the first successful Covid-19 vaccine.
Özlem Türeci (pictured) is the co-founder and chief medical officer of BioNTech, a German biotechnology company that developed a Covid-19 vaccine in collaboration with the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer that was the first to be approved by regulators in 2021.
Türeci and her spouse Uğur Şahin are pioneers of messenger RNA vaccine technology, which has potential uses across a range of diseases, including cancer. The pandemic led to the first clinical approvals of mRNA vaccines developed by both BioNTech and the US company Moderna.
Speaking at an event held by the European Parliament’s Panel for the Future of Science and Technology on 25 January, Türeci said that Europe is a leader in mRNA technology and “many other innovations which will help us in future to address global challenges”.
But she warned: “This is really a call to action that we should continue to work on this leadership…[and] what we need to improve for this purpose [is] many things.”
She highlighted the importance of funding of early stage and translational R&D in both academia and startups, recalling that she had encountered problems getting her science funded because of reviewers “not believing” in it, as well as problems with publishing papers and spinning off a company.
“Our environment was not used to it, and no one really knew what to do with us,” Türeci said.
Regulation and finance barriers
But she said the most difficult problem was getting venture capital to finance BioNTech, and that there is “a lot of space for improvement” in the EU’s regulatory environment.
Türeci called for improvements in European fostering of viable biotech ecosystems, public-private partnerships and “modern mission-oriented regulations and policies for clinical trials in particular”.
“Our regulations get more and more sophisticated and drift away from what we need in order to enable what technologically and scientifically is feasible,” she added, singling out the EU’s new clinical trials and in-vitro diagnostics regulation.
Speaking at the same event, MEP Christian Ehler said that Europe has “world-leading scientific research but often falters when it comes to the last step of translating that research into actual applications and commercial products”.
He said Europe has been “a failure” when it comes to capital investment but that the European Innovation Council, which has a €10 billion 2021-27 budget for investing in cutting-edge technologies, is going some way to solve the problem.