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The news that a Pfizer vaccine is 90% effective against COVID-19 has been heralded as a turning point in the global fight against the virus.
But while the vaccine has been funded by the American pharmaceutical giant, the science itself is the work of BioNTech, a German company founded by the married couple and dedicated physicians Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci.
Together, they are being hailed as the brains that enabled the transformative potential coronavirus vaccine to come.
Ugur Sahin is CEO and co-founder of the German biotech firm
Dr. Ozlem Tureci is the company’s medical director. Credit biontech.de
Scientists and entrepreneurs, Professor Sahin, 55, and Dr Tureci, 53, are now among the 100 richest Germans, and the value of their BioNTech company has soared to $ 21 billion (£ 16 billion million) as a result of the advancement of the vaccine.
But, as children of immigrants, they come from humbler origins.
BioNTech CEO Sahin was born in the Turkish city of Iskenderun and moved to West Germany at the age of four. His father was a Gastarbeiter, a migrant worker at a Ford factory in Cologne.
Dr. Tureci, who is the medical director of the company, was born in Germany and is the daughter of a Turkish doctor who emigrated to the country from Istanbul.
Mr. Sahin trained as a doctor and studied in Cologne and Hamburg, but focused on immunotherapy research. He met Dr. Tureci early in his academic career.
Dr. Tureci once said in an interview that even on their wedding day, they both made time for lab work.
The couple had a passion for research and oncology that led to their first company, Ganymed Pharmaceuticals, which they founded in 2001.
The company set out to investigate the possibility of using modified genetic code, or Messenger RNA (mRNA), to trick the body into fighting cancer and developing antibodies to fight it.
They sold this business in 2016 for $ 1.4 billion (£ 1 billion). By then, they were already busy building BioNTech, founded in 2008, to pursue a much broader range of cancer immunotherapy tools.
The pair’s work on the potential of mRNA turned out to be vital in the development of the COVID-19 vaccine.
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In January, Professor Sahin came across a scientific paper on a new coronavirus outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
He was amazed at how small the step was from mRNA cancer drugs to mRNA-based viral vaccines.
BioNTech quickly assigned around 500 employees to project the “speed of light” to work on various possible compounds, winning pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and Chinese pharmacist Fosun as partners in March.
Now trials have shown that the vaccine, which uses genetic material from mRNA to stimulate the body to produce antibodies, is 90% effective.
The headquarters of the £ 16 billion company. Stock Image
Colleagues describe Professor Sahin as “modest” and low-key.
Matthias Theobald, professor of oncology at the University of Mainz, where Professor Sahin still teaches, said: “He is a very modest and humble person. Appearances mean little to him.
“But he wants to create the structures that allow him to realize his visions and that is where his aspirations are far from modest.”
Matthias Kromayer, a member of the board of directors of venture capital firm MIG AG, whose funds have backed BioNTech, said: “Despite his accomplishments, he never stopped being incredibly humble and personable.”
