From Cell Biology to Wall Street
Wall Street Journal reporter Greg Zuckerman has
written a page turning thriller on the race to develop COVID-19 vaccines in
record time. He brings to life the key developers of the COVID vaccines who
were previously working on vaccines for cancer and AIDS. He further explains
how a group of scientific outsiders who, with the aid of venture capital
dollars, bet the ranch on mRNA (messenger RNA) as a method of delivering
protection against the deadly COVID virus. The result came in the form of the
Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines.
Also in the race were the more traditional vaccines
based on the adenovirus technology that were under development at Johnson &
Johnson (JNJ) and the Oxford University/Astra Zeneca joint venture. The Oxford
vaccine came out of the gate early, but it was plagued by testing issues and
the JNJ vaccine had an issue with a rare side effect that slowed its adoption.
Zuckerman’s character sketches draw you into the major
personalities. We have French immigrant Stephane Bancel, the highly promotional
CEO of Moderna who on many occasions promised more than he could deliver. In
fact, Moderna was the most shorted biotech stock as of the end of 2019. Nevertheless,
Bancel had the foresight to buy an old Polaroid factory in Massachusetts that
enabled Moderna to manufacture vaccines at scale and the shorts got their faces
ripped off later. More interesting are the Turkish immigrant husband and wife
team Uger Sahin and Ozlem Tureci who run BioNTech from their laboratory in
Mainz, Germany. After scrimping for cash, the Swiss billionaire Thomas
Strungmann funds them. And they struggled mightily to get off their initial
public offering. The lesson here is that there is a symbiotic relationship
between biological science and Wall Street, something that Congress should be
very reluctant to tamper with.
Lacking production capabilities Sahin convinces
pharmaceutical giant Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla to go all in on vaccine
production. Bourla is so convinced that he turns down federal Warp Speed
funding. He rightly believed that government could slow things down. Where
Pfizer had nerve and strategic vision, Merck, the leading vaccine producer,
chose not to enter the vaccine race. Years earlier Merck failed spectacularly
with an experimental AIDS vaccine.
The most interesting character is the Hungarian
immigrant Katalin Kariko. She is a true believer in mRNA and struggles for years
as a postdoctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania. In fact, the authorities
at Penn demote her. Nevertheless, she struggles on and develops a key process
with Drew Weisman to modify natural mRNA to enable it to evade the body’s
immune system. Her process is adopted by both Moderna and BioNTech. She ends up
as senior executive at BioNTech and it is my uneducated guess that she and
Weisman will soon win the Nobel Prize for Medicine. As an aside, her daughter won
gold medals for rowing in the 2008 and 2012 Olympics.
Although there is quite a bit of molecular biology in
the book, my high school advanced biology course from years ago seemed
sufficient to get the gist of what was going on. Thus, the reader should not be
deterred. Zuckerman has written a work of history that reads like a novel. My
one quibble is that he should have pointed out that Bourla and Sahin are
coincidentally grandsons of Salonika. (Now Thessaloniki) As a result of the
Treaty of Sevres which called for the removal of Muslims from Greece and Greeks
from western Turkey Sahin’s Muslim family was exiled to Turkey in 1920 and
Bourla’s Jewish family remained, but just barely survived the Nazi holocaust in
Greece. Who knows, perhaps both of their grandparents might have known each
other in that very cosmopolitan city where most of the Turkish leadership of
the 1920’s came from.
For the full Amazon URL see: From Cell Biology to Wall Street (amazon.com)
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