JAMIE CARR: BioNTech’s cure for the common cynic
The German company soared to prominence during Covid, and now it’s taking on cancer
Pharmaceutical companies regularly get a kicking for having the audacity to want to make a bit of a return for their shareholders rather than just dish out the meds to anyone who needs them. It doesn’t take a towering intellect to realise that without some sort of return there would be no way to fund the staggering costs it takes to get a drug through round after round of clinical trials before it gets anywhere near a patient, and medical progress depends on this profit motive.
There has rarely been a more inspiring example of what pharma can achieve than BioNTech’s response to Covid, and few who were stuck at home in the early stages of the pandemic praying that they didn’t end up on a ventilator would begrudge the company its 2021 revenues of €18.9bn. The company launched Project Lightspeed to develop a novel mRNA technology for a Covid vaccine days after the virus’s genetic sequence was made public in January 2020, and by December the vaccine was approved. With Pfizer han...
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