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Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci are behind the German vaccine company Biontech. Both have roots in Turkey and are compared to Tesla.
Married couple Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci are celebrating a breakthrough with their corona vaccine. Doctors with Turkish roots founded the Biontech company in 2008 together with a colleague and investors.
Photo: Biontech
There is a clearly recognizable light at the end of the long tunnel, also known as the year 2020: German company Biontech and American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced a breakthrough for their corona vaccine on Monday afternoon. Emergency approval is underway, 50 million doses of vaccines will be ready by the end of the year and 1.3 billion will be added in 2021 (read here what the vaccine manufacturer’s successful announcement means).
The news breaks out amid a chaotic second corona wave in Europe and it’s thanks to Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci. The couple founded the Biontech company in Mainz in 2008 and are the brains behind the biotech group to this day. Researchers have achieved what many only dream of and exemplify a growing group in Germany: the self-employed with a migrant background. A German study in October showed that their number has increased by a third since 2005, to 800,000. There are 2.3 million jobs in their companies. For the most part, these are no longer kebab bars or grocery stores, but construction companies, service providers, or innovation drivers like Biontech. CEO Ugur Sahin and CMO Özlem Türeci employ more than 1,300 people.
CMO stands for Chief Medical Officer, Türeci is practically the best doctor in the company. His family is from Istanbul, he was born in 1967 in Lastrup in northern Germany, where his father worked as a doctor and surgeon in a hospital. CEO Ugur Sahin was born in Iskenderun, Turkey in 1965. At the age of four he came to Germany with his mother, where his father worked in a car factory. Sahin studied medicine in Cologne and received a Ph.D. on immunotherapy for tumor cells. His work then led him to the Homburg University Hospital in Saarland, where he met Özlem Türeci, who was studying medicine there. The two moved to the University of Mainz in 2000. Sahin leads an oncology research group there, Türeci is a private professor.
Two companies founded with twins
The couple founded Biontech in 2008 together with Christoph Huber. Huber is still there today, he’s on the supervisory board. The money for the foundation came mainly from the twins Andreas and Thomas Strüngmann, 250 million euros flowed. The couple and the investors already knew each other from the Ganymede company, which develops antibodies against cancer. They also founded Sahin and Türeci, and the twins’ money was also on Ganymede. The Strüngmanns made money from their own company Hexal, in 2005 they sold the generic maker to Novartis for 5.6 billion euros.
Biontech has been causing a sensation since the spring when the company received its first approval for clinical trials with vaccine candidates in Germany. Sahin read about the unknown virus and the outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan for the first time in January in the British trade journal “Lancet.” And he anticipated what no one in Europe wanted to admit at the time: “In April our schools will be closed,” Sahin told his wife at the time, according to the “Manager-Magazin.” He was only wrong with the speed, everything was faster.
Participation goes up from $ 30 to $ 105
The company’s share price shows the successful increase that Biontech has achieved with the corona vaccination. In February, shares of the US technology exchange Nasdaq were still worth around $ 30, and since March they have been rising sharply. They closed at $ 92 last Friday and skyrocketed to $ 105 on Monday. Sahin became a billionaire, owns 19 percent of the shares, and is now one of the 100 richest Germans.
The Sahin couple and Türeci hadn’t had financial worries before. In 2016 they separated from their participation in Ganymede. The Japanese company Astellas paid a good 422 million euros for the entire company with the prospect of more if the active ingredients were successful. The company’s Mainz address fits in with Biontech today more than ever: at Gold Mine 12.
Biontech released promising data on a corona vaccine on Monday. Therefore, the address of the company must be true.
Photo: Arne Dedert (Keystone / DPA)
According to an interview with investor Thomas Strüngmann, money for researchers is just a side effect, more important is scientific success. “Sahin never put monetization in the foreground,” Thomas Strüngmann said in the “Handelsblatt” last year.. “His dream matches ours, to build something sustainable and permanent and develop fundamentally new and better therapies.” Strüngmann sees Sahin and Türeci as “exceptional phenomena”.
Last year, Sahin received the German prize against cancer. In an interview he saidthat Biontech’s goal is “to develop individualized therapies tailored to the cancer of each individual patient.” To do this, you need to set up the entire innovation chain, including the production of large quantities. “You can compare us to Tesla,” Sahin said. Except that in Biontech the degree of customization is much higher.
Forward at the speed of light
Until now, Biontech has developed messenger ribonucleic acid-based cancer vaccines. The vaccine against the virus is now based on the same technology. It is a technology that Moderna and Curevac also use. Moderna works with Lonza for this.
Biontech’s Corona program is called “Speed of light”, that is, the speed of light. The company has changed almost as quickly, from cancer research to pioneering vaccines. 400 of the 1,300 employees are only concerned about Corona. According to the Association of Pharmaceutical Research Companies, “at least 96 vaccine projects” have been started around the world since the beginning of the year. Biontech is currently one step ahead of all others.
It is now up to the authorities in the US and Europe to issue an emergency license once all the documents have been verified. “When the approval takes place, the next question is: can we in principle deliver vaccines?” Sahin said in interviews with the newspaper in late October. “We have already started producing vaccines. It is in stock with us, is in quality control and has not yet been released. “This approval would only be granted if approval was available.” In principle, these steps can be taken this year. “
For Biontech, this is a great success in the difficult business of biotechnology. It takes a lot of time and money for companies before research leads to products that then go through a lengthy approval process. Failure rates are high. Now in the corona pandemic, companies like Biontech are hoping for immunity and cure. It took them a long time to make headlines.
China and Bill Gates are also involved
So far, Biontech does not have a single drug on the market, but it has ten candidate products in clinical studies. Sars-CoV-2 vaccine candidates are not included. In fiscal year 2019, Biontech registered sales of around 109 million euros. Losses amounted to almost 180 million euros.
In March, the Chinese pharmaceutical company Fosun invested less than one percent in Biontech. Clinical studies could be conducted for the corona vaccine in China. If successful, Fosun will be able to distribute the vaccine exclusively in China. The Chinese paid up to $ 135 million for it. Biontech is opening up to the rest of the world with the US company Pfizer, which also participates and initially paid Biontech 185 million dollars; if successful, up to $ 563 million more will flow.
Biontech investors also include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Singapore’s state fund Temasek has also been one of the shareholders since late June. He and others invested a total of $ 250 million.
