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MARRIED: Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci founded the BioNTech company in 2008. They are the CEO and the medical director of the company, respectively. Photo: BIONTECH
They are both children of Turkish immigrants. Now the couple Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci are among the wealthiest in Germany and are developing the technology behind what could be the first successful corona vaccine.
Following Monday’s corona vaccine breakthrough, German biotech company BioNTech is now valued at $ 21 billion, or just over NOK 189 billion.
With funding from the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, the company uses modern RNA technology in an attempt to create an effective vaccine against the new coronavirus.
At the center of it all is the couple Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci. They founded BioNTech in 2008 and are CEO and Medical Director, respectively, in addition to being on the board.
Background: You think the candidate vaccine is more than 90 percent effective
Initially, BioNTech was working on the development of a general cancer vaccine, but when Sahin found a scientific paper in January about the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in the Chinese city of Wuhan, this changed.
According to Reuters, the professor realized that it would be a short path from the development of mRNA-based cancer drugs to the development of an mRNA-based coronavirus vaccine.
500 people started working on the case and in March BioNTech signed a settlement with Pfizer and Chinese Fosum Pharma.
AT WORK: Professor Ugur Sahin showed the laboratory at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz am Rhein when VG wrote about his work to develop a cancer vaccine in 2006. Photo: Andrea Gjestvang, VG
History of the sun
Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci met in Homburg and together they have built a career out of a common passion for medical research and oncology, that is, the doctrine of cancer. Even on their wedding day in 2002, both must have been in the lab, Türeci himself said in an interview.
They are both children of Turkish immigrants and their origin makes them an example of successful German integration.
Follow the quarantine race in the VG special
According to The Telegraph, Sahin was born in the Turkish Mediterranean city of Iskenderun, near the Syrian border. He moved to West Germany with his parents when he was four years old. His father worked as a guest worker at one of Ford’s automobile factories in Cologne. Türeci was born in Germany, but his father was a doctor who emigrated to the country from Istanbul.
In the 1960s, large numbers of Turks came to Germany. They were originally supposed to be temporary labor, but many stayed and today there are some four million Turks living in the country.
Turkish CNN writes about the couple that they are an example of “how favorable immigration can be for Germany, where there has been talk of immigration in recent years.”
Before BioNTech, the couple also founded the company Ganymed Pharmaceuticals, which develops immunotherapeutic drugs against cancer. The company was sold for 422 million euros in 2016.
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Sahin owns 18 percent of BioNTech’s shares, and with that he is now, on paper, one of the 100 richest in Germany.
– Modest and humble
Ugur Sahin describes himself as a down-to-earth guy with a great passion for the subject.
“Despite all that he has accomplished, he has never stopped being incredibly humble and personable,” Matthias Kromayer, a board member of the venture capital company MIG AG, who has supported BioNTech financially since its inception, told Reuters. .
Kromayer also says that Sahin often goes to meetings in jeans with a bicycle helmet and backpack.
Sahin still teaches at the University of Mainz and his colleagues also have only kind words to say.
– He is a very modest and humble person. The facade means nothing to him. But he wants to create structures that can bring his visions to life, and that is where his efforts are far from modest, one of his colleagues, Matthias Theobald, tells The Telegraph.
