CHICAGO — Özlem Türeci took a seven-year break from attending the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting.
She’d been busy with the Covid-19 pandemic as co-founder and chief medical officer of BioNTech, the zero-to-60 biotech that brought billions of vaccines to people around the globe with Pfizer.
BioNTech has now launched an all-out affront against cancer that’s centered on 10 medicines that the biotech hopes will lead to multiple approvals between 2026 to 2030, and so Türeci made a return to ASCO.
“It was time to come back,” Türeci said in an hour-long interview with Endpoints News. “There’s quite a momentum in the oncology field.”
BioNTech has long worked on vaccines, immune modulators and various other therapies in the oncology field. Then came the pandemic. As the virus fades into endemic status, BioNTech is once again devoted to beating cancer. Combination treatments, including those that pair antibody-drug conjugates with other therapies, are a key pillar of that strategy, Türeci said.
This is a summary of the interview with Türeci.
Expect fewer deals this year: BioNTech had a “major pipeline reshaping” in 2023, and now is the time to focus on existing assets and partnerships, she said. That doesn’t mean BioNTech is shutting the door to potential partners.
“We are a very scientific company, which, however, does not have this ‘not invented here’ complex,” Türeci said. “We are very curious about technological breakthroughs and bits and pieces, which can be implemented into a broader technology space.”
She pointed to cell therapies as an example of promising new delivery technologies.
BioNTech is still “looking into that,” she said, “and probably deals will be more in that space this year.”
Are ADCs the new checkpoint inhibitors?: BioNTech now has five clinical-stage ADCs thanks to deals it inked with MediLink and Duality last year. Amid the hype around “hip” ADCs, Türeci said the company wanted therapies with clinical data, filtering through a couple of dozen companies before making its pacts.
“For a company which wants to develop combination treatments for future medicine, we have to be in the ADC game,” she said.
That said, Türeci doesn’t want the field to repeat its checkpoint inhibitor days.
“Nobody believed in them. Then the first data came in and now checkpoint inhibitors are a commodity,” she said. “We don’t have a diversified checkpoint inhibitor space because many companies were simply too late and too slow. This is what we don’t want to happen in the ADC space. This is why we are coming in so early so that we can co-develop our compounds, which are other modalities, with our ADCs in parallel, not sequentially.”
Summit’s announcement ‘validates’ BioNTech’s combo thesis: The news that the experimental therapy developed by Summit Therapeutics and Akeso topped Merck’s Keytruda in a study in China gives weight to the concept of combining anti-PD1/PD-L1 with an anti-VEGF-A into one antibody, Türeci said.
BioNTech is also working with a Chinese partner on such an antibody, dubbed BNT327. It’s been tested in about 600 patients so far in China, and BioNTech is currently in the process of deciding which indication to go into in a global registrational trial. If the standard of care in the selected setting is Merck’s Keytruda, then BioNTech “would definitely go head to head,” she said.
High hopes for its cancer vaccine: BioNTech is gearing up to share an interim analysis for its Genentech-partnered individualized cancer vaccine in the second half of 2025. That data could “open a regulatory path,” including accelerated approval, if the results are positive, Türeci said. The vaccine is being tested in colorectal, advanced melanoma and pancreatic cancers.
BioNTech and Genentech plan to start another potentially registrational study in the next nine to 12 months in an undisclosed indication, she said. Moderna and Merck have shied away from sharing the timing and approval pathway for their own cancer vaccine candidate.
A wider manufacturing network: The biotech last week announced an expanded mRNA manufacturing project in Rwanda. “This is a very good opportunity to connect to pandemic preparedness concepts,” Türeci said. The manufacturing facility will support studies for malaria, tuberculosis, HIV and others, like mpox, which is “underestimated with regard to the risk it poses,” she said.
BioNTech says ‘no’ to bird flu or autoimmune CAR-Ts: As Moderna reportedly nears a deal with the US to fund trials for a bird flu vaccine, BioNTech has no plans to make such a vaccine.
Meanwhile, as many cell therapy companies expand or pivot to autoimmune, BioNTech doesn’t plan to position its CAR-T projects toward developing treatments for autoimmune diseases for now.
“Our technologies have potential but again we have to focus,” she said.
Talking with industry peers: Prior to the interview, Türeci was speaking with Eliav Barr, chief medical officer of Merck Research Laboratories. Asked if there’s a Merck-BioNTech collaboration coming soon, Türeci said she met with Barr because they had never talked in person.
“I like to know the colleagues who are equally interested in immune therapies,” Türeci said. “What is even more interesting is that he has co-developed Gardasil. That was exciting for me to hear the old stories about that.”