Image above: Ugur Sahin (right) and Özlem
Türeci, the husband and wife team who co-founded BioNTech. Credit: Oxford Film.
We wish National Geographic a speedy finish of its
just-announced documentary that’s going by the working title of “The Cancer Vaccine.”
That’s because the project promises to follow BioNTech co-founders Ugur
Sahin and Özlem Türeci, the duo behind Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, “as they and their team race competitors, skeptics, governments and cancer itself to create an entirely new
class of medicines that use the body’s own defenses to defeat cancer.”
“’The Cancer Vaccine’ will give viewers a front-row seat to one of the biggest events in
history unfolding in real time -- the scientists racing to find a potential cure for cancer,” said Tom McDonald, National Geographic’s executive vice president of global factual and
unscripted content, in a release.
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So how long will it take to finish the documentary? Until cancer is cured?
“We’ve already started following their journey and we
have no airdate just yet,” Jennifer DeGuzman, vice president, communications, National Geographic Channel, told Marketing Daily.
Unlike the COVID virus and its variants,
which is the same from person to person, National Geographic points out that every cancer tumor is different. So “Sahin and Türeci have set themselves an incredibly difficult task: to
create utterly personalized medicines" to "deliver bespoke instructions for each individual patient’s immune system on how to destroy cancer in their body.”
BioNTech has already
conducted a Phase 1 trial of its cancer treatment with pancreatic cancer patients. Half the patients in the trial showed no sign of relapse 18 months after first treatment, while the usual death rate
is 88% within three months of diagnoses, National Geographic noted.
The National Institutes of Health last month said it had funded the initial research of a personalized cancer treatment
vaccine at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. After MSKCC removed the cancer from 19 people, tumor samples were sent to BioNTech, which performed gene sequencing on them to find proteins that
might trigger an immune response to create a personalized vaccine for each patient.
“It’s exciting to see that a personalized vaccine could enlist the immune system to fight
pancreatic cancer—which urgently needs better treatments,” NIH quoted MSKCC’s Dr. Vinod Balachandran as saying. “It’s also motivating as we may be able to use such
personalized vaccines to treat other deadly cancers.”
“But that is only an early trial,” National Geographic said. “This documentary special will be there every step of
the way as the BioNTech team strives to turn promising results for a few patients into a miracle curefor the world.”
The documentary is being produced by National Geographic
content in partnership with Oxford Films.