The pharmaceutical giant Pfizer may be creating one of the vaccines fighting COVID-19, but the science behind the vaccines was created by BioNTech. Ozlem Tureci and Ugur Sahin, a married couple and dedicated physicians, founded BioNTech.
When COVID-19 first struck, Tureci realized that her work on the immune response could be applied to fighting COVID-19. She was of course correct and they created the first widely used vaccine. But the original application of this technology was actually to fight cancer.