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When the Strüngmann twins funded the research of the later founders of Biontech, they believed in their ideas. The risky investment has vastly increased the fortunes of billionaires.
By Peter Althammer, BR
The drug business was born to the identical twins Andreas and Thomas Strüngmann when they saw the light one after the other on February 16, 1950. Their father, Ernst Strüngmann, an ophthalmologist, had run his own mid-size pharmaceutical company since 1956. First in Mühlheim an der Ruhr, then Garmisch-Partenkirchen and finally Tegernsee. Andreas then studied medicine, Thomas studied business administration. Together they continued to run the father’s pharmaceutical company and expand it.
They then founded other pharmaceutical companies and produced so-called generics successfully. These are copycat drugs for which patent protection has expired. Generics are cheaper than original products. The sale of their generic drug maker Hexal, which the brothers founded together in the 1980s, finally made them billionaires in 2005.
Investment in genetic engineering startup
That would have made a comfortable life in luxury possible. But Andreas and Thomas Strüngmann did not walk away with the approximately five and a half billion euros from the sale of Hexal, instead they decided to invest large sums in the young field of medical genetic engineering research. A risk at the time, because the prospects for success were uncertain, the research and development times were long, and the subject of genetic engineering was not exactly popular in Germany. But the brothers believed in technology and in Germany as a business location.
Around the same time, cancer doctors Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin founded their first company. In search of venture capitalists, they finally came to the Munich venture capital company of the Strüngmann brothers. In September 2007 they presented their startup Ganymed to Thomas Strüngmann. The company was researching a new cancer drug that uses a genetic engineering process based on so-called messenger RNA (mRNA).
150 million initial capital for the founders of Biontech
The presentation was a great success: the twin brothers and their co-investors joined Ganymede with the extraordinarily high sum of 150 million euros. A quick decision, as those involved recall: After Thomas spoke briefly with his brother Andreas on the phone, he returned to the conference room and said briefly, “We will.” The cornerstone for trusted cooperation with the later founders of Biontech was laid.
In 2008, the two cancer researchers, Türeci and Şahin, founded Biontech. It was not a vaccine against viral diseases, but a new type of cancer therapy. When the company listed its shares on the New York Stock Exchange in October 2019, it was valued at $ 3.4 billion. Insiders assume that almost half of the shares belong to the Strüngmann twins.
“Lucky coincidence”
Then in 2020, the sensation: it turned out that the Biontech method is suitable for producing a coronavirus vaccine. The share price soared. The company is now valued at around $ 24 billion. Thomas Strüngmann later described as a “lucky coincidence” that Biontech had become a major company in the fight against Corona.
