U?ur ?ahin arrives at BioNTech’s headquarters in the German city of Mainz on the same battered bicycle he has been riding for 20 years. Developing the best-selling Covid-19 vaccine may have transformed BioNTech’s founders into billionaires, but the chief executive of the biotech business has resisted making changes in his personal life.
?ahin and his wife, chief medical officer ?zlem Türeci, set up BioNTech in 2008 to create a toolbox to transform the treatment of cancer. Since finding fame, their vision has not shifted. When practising as doctors, the pair had become frustrated at the gap between the cancer drugs available on the wards — and what they believed was scientifically possible.
So, while the mRNA vaccine they developed with the American pharmaceuticals company Pfizer has saved millions of lives and brought economies around the world back to life, it was also, in some ways, a side hustle. BioNTech “is a cancer company that was able to drop everything they were doing to create a Covid vaccine,” says Akash Tewari, an analyst at Jefferies.