Why Did BioNTech’s First Cancer Trials Falter? The German Regulator Must Know

Social media has been abuzz with the publication of more than a thousand pages of FOIA’d records of the COVID-19 “Crisis Team” of the German public health authority, the Robert Koch Institute. Although heavily redacted, the records appear to show that German authorities knowingly went into a hard lockdown and adopted other draconian containment measures without scientific justification.

But there are numerous other records which German authorities hold and which could help to clarify crucial questions related to the declared COVID-19 pandemic and the response to it. Hence, there are numerous other reasons for testing the waters of Germany’s relatively recent Freedom of Information law. (Germany’s Freedom of Information Act dates from 2005 and was revised in 2013.)

For instance, with increasing attention being paid to a recent explosion of cancer diagnoses and everyone but the mainstream media wondering if it might not be connected to oncogenic properties of the mRNA vaccines with which virtually the entire Western world was vaccinated in the name of combatting COVID-19, would it not be interesting to know more about earlier clinical trials of the German company BioNTech?

As at least my readers will know, BioNTech is the actual owner and legal manufacturer of what is more commonly and misleadingly known as the “Pfizer” COVID-19 vaccine. It is also a company which was founded to develop mRNA-based cancer treatments and which was almost entirely focused on this goal prior to Covid. The company’s founders, Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci, are oncologists.

Since its founding in 2008, however, BioNTech had not gotten very far. In The Vaccine, the auto-hagiographical account of the development of their COVID-19 vaccine which Sahin and Türeci wrote with Financial Times journalist Joe Miller, they say that they had tested their mRNA-based cancer drugs on merely 400 people in Phase 1 and Phase 2 clinical trials since 2012 (p. 41). Why had they never made it to a large-scale Phase 3 clinical trial?

A search of the EU Clinical Trials Register turns up just three Phase 2 BioNTech clinical trials which were registered prior to 2020. (Phase 1 trials involving only adults are not included in the database.) No results are available for any of them. The earliest of these trials only began in 2019, just five months before the official start of the Covid outbreak in Wuhan. This trial, however, is listed as having been “prematurely ended”. See the screenshot below. (“HU” stands for Hungary and “DE” for Germany.)

Why did BioNTech’s cancer drug trials not get any further? Could it have been that the company’s mRNA-based therapies were in fact accelerating cancers rather than reversing them?

As the responsible oversight authority, the German vaccines and medicines regulator, the PEI, certainly knows and possesses information which could help clarify these questions. Moreover, as I have shown here, the PEI has in fact a longstanding collaborative relationship with the company.

Think of the massive amount of documentation which American courts have forced the FDA to release on the clinical trial of BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine (the so-called “Pfizer documents”, even though the sponsor of the trial in question was in fact BioNTech). Why should the PEI not be required to be just as forthcoming about BioNTech’s prior cancer drug trials?

Stop Press: By the way, the third of the Phase 2 clinical trials registered by BioNTech prior to 2020 is also of some interest. This one was registered in 2019. Look at how the sponsor name is given.

Robert Kogon is the pen name of a widely-published journalist covering European affairs. Subscribe to his Substack.