BioNTech founders Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci are honored with the Axel Springer Award

• The Corona vaccine developed by the medical couple Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci was the first approved worldwide.
• For this, they will be presented with the Axel Springer Award this Thursday evening – which you can follow live via our stream from 7 p.m. here.
• The Federal Cross of Merit will follow on Friday: German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will present it at Bellevue Palace in the presence of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
• See more stories on Insider’s business page.

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By now, everyone has probably heard their names. Medical couple Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci, completely unknown to most before the Corona pandemic began, have become heroes of the crisis: Their mRNA vaccine Comirnaty was the first to be regularly licensed worldwide against the coronavirus.

For this, they will be presented with the Axel Springer Award this Thursday evening – which you can follow live via our stream from 7 p.m. here.

It will not remain the only award that the two rather publicity-shy researchers will receive. The Federal Cross of Merit will follow on Friday: Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will present it at Bellevue Palace in the presence of Chancellor Angela Merkel. The Nobel Prize may even be on the horizon – many would at least like to see them get it.

Three elements led to success, say Sahin and Türeci

The medical experts revealed to Business Insider what he sees as the three elements that were crucial to the vaccine development project, dubbed “Lightspeed,” actually moving so quickly. The first, he said, was the combination of technology and science. “Because of our decades of research on mRNA technologies in individual cancer medicine, we had both the knowledge and the technology to develop custom mRNA vaccines in a matter of weeks,” Sahin says. “We had done this hundreds of times before. So, as immunologists, we were able to precisely define how the mRNA vaccine should target the immune system against the virus.”

The second element, he says, was a willingness to take risks. “We had made a joint decision in the executive and supervisory boards to refocus our research and invest significant resources in the project,” Sahin said. “There was no guarantee of success – but we wanted to leave no stone unturned. We knew we could make a difference and felt we had a duty to help if we could.”

The third element, he says, was the great determination of everyone involved in making it happen. Sahin recounts, “With “Project Lightspeed,” we relentlessly followed the principle of minimizing development times without skipping development steps or taking shortcuts. In doing so, we trusted in the capabilities of our outstanding team and that science would guide us.” Thus, he said, tasks that are normally approached sequentially in vaccine development were done in parallel.

The teams worked tirelessly, in self-coordinated 24/7 shifts. “Another important element was collaborations: Everyone pulled together. Our partnerships with Pfizer, Fosun, and other companies increased international reach via complementary expertise.” Early dialogue with regulatory agencies and governments was also an important cornerstone of the vaccine’s rapid approval, he said. “Our whole mantra was: we have no time to lose, because every day and every hour counts,” Sahin says. It wasn’t until they reached their goal, he says, that they themselves realized that this was by far the fastest vaccine development in the history of medicine.

From guest worker children to cancer researchers – and billionaires

For 20 years, the pair worked on mRNA technology; together they published hundreds of scientific papers and filed countless patents. Only now is all that work paying off. In early October, Welt am Sonntag published a list of the richest people in Germany. In 93rd place: medicine professor Ugur Sahin and his wife Özlem Türeci. Their fortune has risen from 650 million to 2.4 billion euros within a year – in other words, it has almost quadrupled in such a short time.

But who are the two scientists behind the vaccine? Sahin’s family came to Germany from Turkey when he was four years old. His father worked as a guest worker at Ford. Sahin first studied medicine in Cologne, and later worked in internal medicine and hematology/oncology at the University Hospital in Cologne. He wrote his doctoral thesis on immunotherapy in tumor cells. Since then, his focus has been on cancer research and immunology. Since 2006, Sahin has been Professor of Experimental Oncology at the III Medical Clinic of the University of Mainz.

Özlem Türeci also has Turkish roots: Her father, a doctor, had come to Germany from Istanbul to work in a hospital here. Like him, Türeci studied medicine and became a doctor. “Heise” reports that she and Sahin met in the early 1990s in the cancer ward of the hospital in Homburg an der Saar.

Both were fascinated by the idea of being able to treat cancer in a way other than surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. They wanted to get the immune system to attack the cancer cells themselves – and they succeeded. Together, they founded Ganymed Pharmaceuticals in 2001: The biopharmaceutical company specialized in antibody drugs against tumors.

“Sahin never prioritized monetization”.

Fifteen years later, the couple sold Ganymed Pharmaceuticals to a Japanese pharmaceutical company – for about 422 million euros. However, the topic remained with them: Even today, private lecturer Özlem Türeci is considered a pioneer in the field of cancer immunotherapy and is a board member of the German top cluster for individualized immune intervention Ci3.

But this company is not the only one the couple founds. In 2008, they set up BioNTech, another company researching medical agents – and now, together with U.S. partner Pfizer, they were the first to have an approved Corona vaccine. Both companies launched a global test on the potential vaccine in late July 2020.

No wonder, then, that Sahin and Türeci are among the most successful Germans. It doesn’t seem to be about the money for the couple, however. Investor Thomas Strüngmann explained in an interview with Handelsblatt, “Sahin has never put monetization first.” His dream, he said, is to “build something sustainable, lasting, and fundamentally develop new, better therapies.”

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