Making a difference with BioNTech’s COO Sean Marett

BioNTech is a biotech company specialising in lab-to-market immunotherapies. Sean Marett, COO reveals the reasons for his love of biotech and the company’s quest to further advances in this field

How did you enter the pharmaceutical sector?

My interest for pharma and biotech arose during my studies at university where I became fascinated in particular in how the immune system reacted to disease. I started my first job in the pharma business in 1987 at Pfizer. Since then I have been working for large pharmaceutical companies such as GSK and Pfizer for over 30 years in different positions such as the management of operations, sales and marketing and licensing, M&A and new product development and I am still fascinated by the dynamics and innovative power of this sector.

What do you think is the greatest discovery in medicine?

There are many important discoveries that each played a pivotal role in human health from Jenner’s first use of the cowpox vaccine to protect against smallpox to Fleming’s discovery of penicillin. However, one of the overarching discoveries that will continue to shape medicine for decades to come is the discovery of DNA in 1953.

How do you see pharmaceuticals evolving?

We see medicine for chronic disease evolving rapidly to tailored solutions for the individual patient. This is being enabled by swift leaps in technology that allow us to investigate disease at a molecular level and determine treatment options on an individual patient basis. Probably the most advanced application of such an approach today is in cancer. Just like you and I are unique, so our tumours are too and based upon the information we can obtain from the tumour, we can develop a treatment just for you. That´s what we are doing at BioNTech: we provide a personalised cancer vaccine treatment for each patient.  

What do you think is the biggest threat to health at the moment?

There are a number of threats to health, ranging from the threat of multiple resistance to antibiotics to increasing obesity in industrialised nations to emerging or mutating viruses. In the cancer area, access to affordable medicines will increasing become a challenge, given that treatment will continue to move to combination products containing higher priced immunotherapies.   

Can you name one goal to achieve today that could have a positive impact against that threat?

At BioNTech, we are very focused at reducing the cost of manufacture of our individualised cancer vaccines to allow broad access to these medicines. In this regard, we partnered in 2015 with Siemens to help us to build a fully automated, digitalised and paperless manufacturing facility to help us to achieve this aim. We are also looking at lower cost ways to deliver our vaccines, as described in our most recent publication in the scientific journal Nature in June of this year.