BNTX BioNTech SE

By Bojan Pancevski 

BERLIN -- Early last year, Ingmar Hörr was at the forefront of the world's race to make the first Covid-19 vaccine. The company he had founded and was leading, CureVac NV, had developed a promising candidate using largely untested technology he pioneered.

Then, he suffered a crippling stroke that left him in a coma for weeks. Even as he regained consciousness, he couldn't remember his name and briefly feared he had been abducted by Russian spies.

While he recovered in the hospital under a fake identity, a rival German biotech company, Pfizer Inc. partner BioNTech SE went on to develop the West's first vaccine using the same mRNA technology.

Now back on his feet, Mr. Hörr has re-entered the race. This is the story of the blow that almost ended his life, and of how he recovered as CureVac's vaccine effort got back on track.

Compared with many rivals, CureVac was late in submitting its vaccine for review in Europe -- and it now expects approval there by June. But the shot could be a godsend for Europe in particular, which has been trailing the U.S. and the U.K. in vaccinations.

Initial data suggests it can be stored at a temperature of 4 degrees Celsius, or 39.2 degrees Fahrenheit, and could prove easier to manufacture, distribute and administer than many competing shots. CureVac has agreed to deliver 405 million doses to the European Union and is working with Novartis AG, GlaxoSmithKline PLC and Bayer AG to produce the shot. It is also cooperating with Tesla Inc., which is developing portable RNA printers that could be deployed to Covid-19 hot spots to quickly produce vaccines on the ground.

All this, however, came very close to being derailed early last year.

On March 2, 2020, then-CureVac Chief Executive Daniel Menichella, an American, was dining at the White House alongside other industry leaders. He held a short presentation, claiming that CureVac could have a vaccine ready in months.

Soon after, several German newspapers reported that President Trump had been so impressed that he tried to persuade CureVac to relocate to the U.S. -- something the company denied. Then on March 11, CureVac announced that Mr. Menichella had been replaced as CEO with Mr. Hörr, who had returned to the helm after a hiatus as a nonexecutive director.

Two days later, Mr. Hörr was in Berlin when he suffered a massive stroke in his hotel room. Luckily for him, the incident happened when he was on the phone with his assistant, who was then able to alert emergency services, which probably saved his life, Mr. Hörr said.

The executive was taken to the Charité clinic in Berlin, where doctors registered him under an assumed name to protect him from the media attention that was surrounding the company at the time.

When Mr. Hörr woke up from a coma in Charité's intensive-care unit weeks later, the name on his bed was Paul Kern, and he was surrounded by nurses who spoke Russian with each other.

The nurses were among the many Germans of Russian descent who work in the city's healthcare system. But in his confusion, Mr. Hörr thought he had been abducted by Russian secret services.

"It was quite the horror: I didn't know what was happening to me, I didn't know what I was doing in this bed tied to a drip and a catheter," Mr. Hörr said in an interview. "I understood that I had some importance because all these people were tending to me."

After waking up, he said, he was unable to speak or move. He spent five weeks in the emergency ward, slowly regaining his memory and relearning basic physical functions. Once released, he would spend another four months in rehabilitation clinics.

During Mr. Hörr's convalescence, Franz-Werner Haas, a lawyer and CureVac's former chief operating officer, took over as CEO. Shortly after, the German government announced that it would inject EUR530 million, equivalent to $632.5 million, into the company -- EUR300 million in equity and the rest in grants -- topped up with some EUR80 million in EU loans. On Aug. 14, the company raised $213 million in an initial public offering to boost the development of its Covid-19 vaccine.

It wasn't until December that Mr. Hörr became able to reclaim a more active role in public life. By then, however, CureVac had accumulated serious delays in its vaccine development.

Mr. Hörr had researched messenger RNA, the approach taken by CureVac and several others for their Covid-19 shots, while pursuing his doctorate in biology and immunology in the 1990s. In 1999, using an mRNA molecule as a control substance in an experiment, he discovered that it triggered a strong immune response. This led him to set up his company in 2000 as one of the first in the field.

Mr. Hörr says the fact that CureVac was overtaken by younger rivals BioNTech and Moderna Inc. was partly due to the nature of its product: While both BioNTech and Moderna use an artificial component in their mRNA to improve stability and lower adverse reactions, CureVac has stuck to Mr. Hörr's original formula of using only natural mRNA -- a more complex approach that has prolonged the vaccine's development.

This, Mr. Hörr said, will enable the vaccines to be stored at normal temperatures, unlike rival products that must be kept at around minus-20 degrees Celsius. In addition, CureVac's vaccine uses 60% less mRNA than BioNTech's, and one-eighth as much as Moderna's, a potential advantage in scaling up production, he said.

Stability at higher temperatures was a requirement in part because investors such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation had made it an early condition of their backing, as they wanted to provide drugs to poor nations that could struggle with complex cold-chain requirements, Mr. Hörr said.

Now almost entirely recovered, Mr. Hörr is considering a possible return to the company, not as a CEO, but possibly in the management board, he said.

His next goals after bringing the vaccine to market in the EU include developing a second-generation shot to tackle emerging mutations and supplying the vast swaths of the developing world where the virus is spreading unhindered, undergoing mutations that could potentially render current vaccines less effective.

"If we only focus on the Western countries, we will allow the virus to mutate elsewhere -- and then come back to haunt us. That's already happening," Mr. Hörr said. "We must see this as a global task, and the CureVac vaccine is ideal for that."

Write to Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 24, 2021 07:17 ET (11:17 GMT)

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