No Family Car: Meet Modest Billionaire Turkish-German Couple Behind Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine (photos)
A Turkish-German billionaire couple have become pacesetters in the race towards discovering a vaccine against coronavirus, following announcement that their Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine has proved 90% effective against the virus.
Turkish-born Ugur Sahin, 55, is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of German biotech firm, BioNTech. He co-founded it with his wife and fellow board member, Özlem Türeci, 53, alongside his former teacher and Austrian cancer expert, Prof Christoph Huber.
It would be recalled that on Monday, BioNTech‘s partner, US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, announced that their candidate vaccine was more than 90% effective in preventing infection in volunteers.
Read Also: Pfizer, BioNTech’s COVID-19 Vaccine Shows 90% Effectiveness After Trials
The news drove a 14% surge in BioNTech shares, lifting the fortunes of its billionaire founder, Uğur Şahin, and the firm’s largest investors, the German billionaire brothers Thomas and Andreas Struengmann.
On Tuesday, the market value of their Nasdaq-listed company jumped to $25.72 billion — a massive leap from $4.6 billion last year.
The soaring stock price boosted Şahin’s net worth by more than $500 million to about $4.4 billion, while the Struengmann brothers collectively added nearly $1.5 billion to their fortunes, with each now worth an estimated $10.4 billion.
The couple crossed the billionaire threshold in June, when BioNTech shares surged over news of its collaboration with Pfizer.
Another stock surge have now been witness after the early trial data could see their joint fortune rise to nearly $4 billion following news about the success of their vaccine. As such Prof. Sahin and Dr. Tureci are now among the 100 richest Germans.
The scientists are to make more money from the vaccine once approved for general use, as analysts at the US investment bank Morgan Stanley projects that Pfizer and BioNTech stand to bring in nearly $13bn (£9.8bn) in global sales from their coronavirus vaccine next year, which will be evenly split between the two companies.
Notwithstanding their wealthy financial status, the billionaire couple’s charitable character and strong commitment to academia and science are priorities to them, even as their work on the COVID-19 vaccine propels them into the global spotlight.
Sahin and his wife reportedly live with their teenage daughter in a modest apartment near their office. Each morning, they pedal to work in Mainz as they do not own a family car. How modest, right?!
Sahin has been described as a “modest and humble” person by colleagues, including Matthias Theobald, a fellow oncology professor at Mainz University, who has worked with him for two decades.
The power couple scientists, Sahin and Tureci have dedicated their lives to the field of oncology and infectious diseases, spending years pioneering personalized immunotherapy treatments for cancer.
However, amid the coronavirus pandemic, the groundbreaking research of the couple in the field of modified genetic code has now catapulted them into the public eye, as the brains behind the world’s first effective coronavirus vaccine.
Speaking with reporters on Tuesday, Sahin speaking about his passion for getting a certified vaccine, said;
I think the good message for mankind is that we now understand that COVID-19 infections can be indeed prevented by a vaccine.
Here’s how the vaccine power couple met one another, and how they made their mark on modern medicine.
Both are children of Turkish immigrants. Sahin was born in Iskenderun, a city on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. He moved to Cologne, Germany when he was four, where his father worked at a local Ford factory, according to Reuters.
He studied medicine at the University of Cologne, and says he often stayed in the lab late into the evening, before cycling home. Today he still cycles to work.
Meanwhile, Özlem Türeci grew up influenced by her father, who was a doctor – he had his practice at home. She at a time stated that, “I could not imagine any other profession even when I was a young girl”.
Sahin met Tureci, the daughter of a Turkish physician, when the pair were both embarking on their academic careers.
They got married in 2002, when Prof Sahin was working at the University Medical Centre Mainz. BBC reports that even on their wedding day, Prof Sahin spent some time in the lab, and today he continues to teach at the university.
The couple became biotech entrepreneurs in 2001, launching Ganymed Pharmaceuticals, to develop immunotherapy cancer drugs. They sold it in 2016 for €422m (£376m).
Sahin and Tureci set up BioNTech in the central German city of Mainz in 2008.
BioNTech employs more than 1,300 people from over 60 countries, more than half of them women, Deutsche Welle reports.
In January, after reading about coronavirus in The Lancet, Prof Sahin observed how fast it was spreading, and after studying the data he dedicated more than 400 staff to developing a vaccine.
The Vaccine
Their COVID-19 vaccine approach uses genetic material, mRNA, to trick cells into producing bits of protein that look like pieces of the virus. The immune system learns to recognize and attack those bits and, in theory, would react fast to any actual infection.
On Tuesday, Sahin said he believed the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine “will not be the only vaccine” against COVID-19, noting that a number of Phase 3 vaccine trials are ongoing.
Sahin also stated that BioNTech‘s goal, in cooperation with Pfizer, is to ramp up production of their vaccine candidate and that they hope to manufacture up to 1.3 billion doses by the end of 2021, if it receives authorization.
He reiterated that BioNTech and Pfizer plan to ask the US Food and Drug Administration to authorize emergency use of the vaccine, with that request coming perhaps as early as next week.
