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Progress on a Covid-19 vaccine has propelled the modest husband-and-wife team behind the German company BioNTech to the global spotlight, with attention inevitably focused on their backgrounds as the children of Turkish immigrants.
Ugur Sahin and his wife Ozlem Tureci founded BioNTech in the western German city of Mainz in 2008 and, together with US giant Pfizer, are developing the leading candidate in the global search for a vaccine.
The announcement Monday that its vaccine was more than 90 percent effective in trials sparked newsletters around the world and raised hopes and equity markets.
BioNTech is now worth $ 25.8 billion (€ 21.8 billion), more than Germany’s largest lender, Deutsche Bank.
Sahin, the CEO, came to the country when he was four years old and his father got a job at a Ford plant in Cologne as a member of the “Gastarbeiter” (guest worker) generation of migrant workers, many of whom ended up staying in Germany. .
Tureci, BioNTech’s medical director, is the daughter of a Turkish doctor who emigrated from Istanbul.
Described as hardworking and passionate, the pair seem wary of superlatives or the temptation to establish their journey as a model of successful integration.
“I’m not sure I want that,” Sahin told British newspaper The Guardian.
“As a society, we have to ask ourselves how we can give everyone the opportunity to contribute to society. I am an accidental example of someone with an immigration background. It could have been equally German or Spanish. “
– ‘Simply authentic’ –
Although only now discovered by the general public, the two have long been known in the scientific community as leading figures in cancer research, with the self-declared goal of “revolutionizing” cancer medicine.
Specializing in molecular medicine and immunology, Sahin, 55, trained first at the University of Cologne and then at the Saarland University Hospital, where he crossed paths with the medical student Tureci.
They got married in 2002, even returned to the lab on their wedding day, and have a daughter.
Tureci has described his childhood as closely linked to medicine. “My father’s office was in the family home,” he once told a German science website, adding that he “couldn’t imagine” any other job than that of a doctor.
Neither of them saw themselves running a company, but their lines of research seemed “too daring” for the pharmaceutical industry to notice, he told the Tagesspiegel newspaper.
They founded their first biotech company, Ganymed, in 2001, and sold it in 2016, while their second, BioNTech, developed a new generation of individual therapies for cancer patients, based on the same technology now used in their vaccine against the coronavirus.
With around 1,500 employees today, it has the backing of major private investors.
Two of them, Thomas Struengmann and Michael Motschmann, described the couple this week as “simply authentic people, with great integrity, hardworking and exceptionally intelligent.”
At BioNTech headquarters in Mainz, on a street with the auspicious name “An der Goldgrube” (In the gold mine), scientists are working on a new technology known as messenger RNA, which involves injecting gene strands into the body that dictate defense to cells. mechanism to manufacture against a disease.
BioNTech teams since January have suspended their work on cancer, focusing their efforts on the fight against Covid-19, calling it the “Speed of Light” project.
No vaccine based on this technology has yet been commercialized.
Having identified promising vaccine blueprints, the company formed a partnership in March with US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer.
With their advancement in the vaccine, Sahin and Tureci have become the top 100 richest people in Germany.
But when the couple learned of the encouraging results of their late-stage vaccine trial, they told The Guardian of their relief and how they “celebrated a bit”, before sitting down to “cups of tea.”
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