Meet Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, the Team behind Pfizer Vaccine
Physicians Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci founders of German company BioNTech are the prominent faces behind the successful Pfizer vaccine.
Physicians Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci founders of German company BioNTech are the prominent faces behind the successful Pfizer vaccine.
The vaccine is said to be 90% effective against COVID- 19.
With the development of this new vaccine, the couple who had humble beginnings are now among the 100 richest Germans.
The market worth of their company has skyrocketed to $21bn (£16bn) after the vaccine breakthrough.
Sahin, 55, and Dr Tureci, 53, met each other while they were still pursuing their academic careers.
Chief Executive Officer Ugur Sahin’s father was a migrant worker at a Ford Factory in Cologne. Sahin shifted to West Germany when he was only four years old from the Turkish city of Iskenderun. Ugur Sahin was a trained Doctor however his focus soon shifted to researching immunotherapy.
Dr Tureci was born in West Germany and is the daughter of a Turkish physician who migrated to the country from Istanbul.
The couple was passionate about research and oncology. Dr Tureci in an interview revealed that even at their wedding they made time for lab work.
They created their first company Ganymed Pharmaceuticals which they set up in 2001.
The company worked in developing cancer-fighting antibodies. They sold this business in 2016 for $1.4b. By this time they began working on BioNTech to develop a broader range of cancer immunotherapy tools which included Messenger RNA (mRNA) to send genetic instructions into cells. The company was founded in 2008.
In January Professor Sahin came across a scientific paper on a new Coronavirus outbreak in the city of Wuhan. It then struck him how small the step was from anti-cancer mRNA drugs to mRNA-based viral vaccines.
BioNTech quickly assigned about 500 staff to project “light speed” to work on several possible compounds, winning pharma giant Pfizer and Chinese drugmaker Fosun as partners in March.
Colleagues describe Professor Sahin as “modest” and understated.
Matthias Theobald, a fellow oncology professor at Mainz University, where Professor Sahin still teaches, said: “He is a very modest and humble person. Appearances mean little to him.”
Another board member Matthias Kromayer of venture capital firm MIG AG, whose funds have backed BioNTech said: “Despite his achievements, he never changed from being incredibly humble and personable.”
