Part IThe Story
The waitress at the Proviant-Magazin in Mainz said that of course the guest could sit in the back. The back meant red tablecloths and white napkins, wine glasses and heavy cutlery, the part of the room arranged to look like a serious restaurant. There was one small drawback, the waitress added, smiling. Guests back there sometimes got forgotten.
Özlem Türeci did not want to be forgotten. She steered toward a plain bistro table in the front left corner instead, the part of the room built around ham-and-cheese baguettes and within sight of the counter, and sat down under a loud art print on a bench of blue-black imitation leather. The reporter from Impulse, a German magazine for entrepreneurs, noted the round glasses, the flat shoes, the slight frame, and the way she leafed through the menu with purpose before choosing the lunch special: cod in mustard sauce, broccoli, boiled potatoes. €8.20. That would do. Perhaps a mineral water, if it was no trouble. Lunch was normally sandwiches, she explained, eaten "at my little desk in the office."
This was late 2011. The woman at the bistro table was chief executive of Ganymed Pharmaceuticals, a Mainz company building antibodies against a cancer target that she and her husband had found themselves. She had raised more than €115 million from private investors for it, more, the magazine reported, than anyone else in German biotech. For years she had been the only woman running a German biotech company at all. The reporter struggled to square the figures with the person in front of her, "this almost shy being," and admitted that the other revelation of the interview was easier to believe. Türeci had once wanted to become a nun.
Nine years after that lunch, a vaccine designed in her company's laboratories and run through clinical trials under her direction would be authorized in Britain, then America, then Europe, and would go on to protect more than a billion people. The quiet woman who chose the visible table would be named one of the Financial Times's People of the Year and appear on the cover of Time. In the week of the Phase 3 announcement, Google had to correct its search results, which had been describing her as the "wife" of Uğur Şahin. Eight months later the president of the Republic of Turkey, in front of cameras, referred to her as "his spouse."
She would spend her career trying to be two things that do not usually sit at the same table: unassuming, and impossible to overlook.
By the Numbers
Özlem Türeci, Physician-Founder
€115M+Private capital raised for Ganymed by 2011, a German biotech record at the time
$1.4BReported value of Ganymed's 2016 sale to Astellas Pharma
20 → 1Vaccine candidates narrowed to BNT162b2 in 2020
43,538Participants in the Phase 3 trial behind the first efficacy readout
95%Final efficacy reported in November 2020
540+International patent applications and patents
#93Rank on Germany's rich list in 2020, the first entry by Germans of Turkish descent
The Only Foreigner for Miles
Lastrup sits in the flat farmland of the Cloppenburg district, between Oldenburg and Osnabrück. Türeci, telling the Impulse reporter about it, called it "an agricultural region." Ruder people, the reporter observed, would have used the German word Kaff: the back of beyond. Old people, sick people, no Gymnasium. In the 1970s, she recalled for a 2021 oral-history project marking sixty years of the labor agreement that brought Turks to West Germany, it was a tiny village with a few houses, a few shops, and farms raising cows and chickens. There was an old convent that had become a hospital, St. Elisabeth-Stift, and it was run then, and is still run now, by nuns in white habits whom she remembered as fascinating, agile, capable women who managed everything.
Her father was the doctor there. He was a surgeon born in Istanbul, though the family's roots lay farther east, in Fındıklı on the Black Sea coast of Rize province, where relatives still live. He had come to Germany after medical school; one Turkish account drawn from the journalist Joe Miller's book on BioNTech says he left in 1965 to avoid a compulsory posting in Turkey's southeast. The German medical chamber sent him to Lastrup and put him in charge of the region's care. He was, in his daughter's phrase, the only one: the only Muslim around, the only foreigner. The family lived in a very small house across the road from the hospital, and his practice was in it too.
Her mother was a biologist. One Turkish profile says the couple met in Istanbul and married in 1966, and that around 1970 her father tried to open a clinic in Trabzon. It did not work out, and they returned to Germany. Even the facts of her beginning come in two versions. English-language reference sources, citing German records, give her birthplace as Siegen, on March 6, 1967. Turkish biographies say Lastrup. I could not resolve it, and the uncertainty is fitting. Lastrup is where the story begins either way.
What she remembers is the hospital. Her father sometimes brought his small daughter to work, and she spent most of her time with him in the clinic, "somewhere between appendix and bland diet," as Impulse put it. She watched patients suffer from cancer and diseases nobody could cure. She watched the sisters. "I wanted to help," she said, simply, and for a while helping and the white habit looked like the same thing. She thought about becoming a nun. The daughter of the only Muslim in Lastrup took her idea of a vocation from Catholic nursing sisters, and nobody in the family seems to have found this strange.
Lastrup had no Gymnasium, so she had to leave to get the kind of schooling that leads to medicine. She attended the municipal Gymnasium in Bad Driburg and then the Werner-von-Siemens-Gymnasium in Bad Harzburg. Half a century later, in 2022, the Werner von Siemens Ring, one of Germany's oldest honors for technical achievement, was awarded to her, her husband, their mentor Christoph Huber, and Katalin Karikó. Nobody at the ceremony seems to have mentioned the school in the Harz. It is the sort of coincidence a novelist would cut.
She later called herself a "Prussian Turk." The phrase is a joke, and it is also an accurate description. Prussia stands for punctuality, duty, and procedure, the virtues of a German civil servant. The Turkish half is not explained, because it does not need to be, and also, perhaps, because its meaning is private. Relatives in Fındıklı told a Turkish newspaper in November 2020 that she used to visit as a small girl and play by the stream and in the tea gardens, "a very lively and clever girl even then." They said her father had last come about twenty years earlier, bringing dolls and toys for the children, and that he had since died. Her grandfather's house had been torn down. The cousins had built a new one on the same ground. Our door is always open to them, one cousin said. The other admitted he had never actually met her; he had seen her for the first time on television.
She studied medicine at Saarland University in Homburg from 1986 to 1992. Her doctoral thesis had the kind of title that only another scientist could love: the detection of DNA polymorphisms using minisatellite profiles in tumors and cell lines, together with studies of casein kinase 2 in the oocyte of Xenopus laevis, the African clawed frog. She received the doctorate in 1992. That same year, in her final year of training, she met the man she would work with for the rest of her career.
They met on a hematology-oncology ward. "Uğur being a young physician," she told Chris Anderson at TED in 2021, "and I was still in medical school training on ward." The account she has given ever since puts the setting before the romance. It happened in a cancer ward, among patients who would mostly die, and what the two of them noticed first was that they shared a problem. "We were haunted by the same dilemma," she said.
— Özlem Türeci, Empress Theophano Prize acceptance speech, Thessaloniki, 2021In the 1990s, working at university hospital wards, we too often had to tell our cancer patients that there were no more treatment options for them.
Uğur Şahin was born in İskenderun in September 1965 and arrived in Germany at four, with his mother, to join his father on the line at the Ford factories in Cologne. His primary school teacher recommended the Hauptschule, the lowest track of the German system and one that rarely leads to university. A German neighbor intervened, and he went to the Gymnasium instead, the first child of Turkish guest-worker parents at the Erich-Kästner-Gymnasium in Cologne-Niehl, graduating in 1984. He borrowed popular science books from the library at his local church and followed football. While working as a resident in Homburg, he enrolled for two years in mathematics at the FernUniversität Hagen, a correspondence university, apparently for the pleasure of it. He cycles to work.
Their backgrounds were similar in outline. Both were children of Turkish emigrants, raised in German towns, guided toward medicine by what they saw around them: in her case a father at the bedside, in his a library shelf. Their characters are different, and in nearly every interview from the pandemic years the difference shows in the rhythm of their conversation. He starts the sentence. She qualifies it.
Stefan Stern of Prospect caught the pattern in Thessaloniki in 2021. Şahin was explaining their founding idea, that because each cancer is genetically distinct, treatment should be tailored to each patient. "At that time, in the mid 1990s," he said, "this was a crazy idea…"
"It still is," Türeci said.
"But now we are much closer," her husband answered. "It's less crazy."
The exchange took three lines and shows a great deal about how they work. He talks in terms of distance covered. She talks in terms of how far there is still to go. Both are true, and the partnership seems to depend on neither of them winning that argument.
They married in 2002. The detail that has become the founding legend of the marriage appears in The Guardian and in Turkish profiles alike: on their wedding day, they slipped out of their lab coats, went to the registry office, and went back to the lab. Their daughter was born four years later. Interviewers kept asking about this, as though the wedding afternoon were a symptom that needed diagnosing. The couple kept answering with versions of the same shrug. The work was what they loved, and the registry office was nearby.
The Antibody Apprenticeship
In 2000 they moved to Mainz, a city on the Rhine known for its carnival and as the birthplace of Johannes Gutenberg. Christoph Huber had recruited them. He was the head of hematology-oncology at the University Medical Center of Johannes Gutenberg University and their mentor, and he would co-found every major institution they built over the next two decades: two companies, a nonprofit research institute, and a regional research cluster. Huber was the senior figure who lent the young couple his standing until they had their own, and when the honors came in 2022 he received the Siemens Ring and the honorary citizenship of Mainz alongside them. Every story of this kind has a person who opens the first door. In Şahin's childhood it was a neighbor. In the couple's career it was Huber.
Türeci completed her habilitation in molecular medicine at Mainz in 2002, the German qualification that entitles a researcher to teach at university level, and became a lecturer in cancer immunotherapy. She was a Heisenberg fellow of the German Research Foundation. Her research concerned what would remain her subject: finding molecules that appear on tumor cells and not on healthy ones, and building immune therapies to attack them. She would later describe the realization that pushed her out of purely academic work in an exact phrase. Research, she said, did not always make its way to the patient's bed.
The account she gave in Thessaloniki is more candid about how they learned it. "We had to learn that research alone couldn't get to patients, without robust funding and a drug development organization. So, we turned to the private sector. Only to find that early research without clinical evidence" — the published transcript breaks off there, but the end of the sentence is easy to guess. Investors did not want to pay for ideas that had not been tested in people. Şahin had begun exploring mRNA for cancer vaccines in 2000, and according to Bloomberg's reporting the idea attracted almost no investors. So in 2001, when the three of them founded their first company, they founded it on something investors could understand.
Ganymed Pharmaceuticals made monoclonal antibodies, a technology Wall Street and Frankfurt had been funding for twenty years. The antibodies targeted molecules the couple had discovered themselves. The most important was Claudin 18.2, a variant of a protein that normally sits tucked inside the stomach lining but becomes exposed on certain gastric and esophageal tumors. A 2008 paper by Şahin, Türeci, Huber and colleagues in Clinical Cancer Research called Claudin-18 splice variant 2 "a pan-cancer target suitable for therapeutic antibody development." The drug built on it became zolbetuximab.
Türeci was Ganymed's chief scientific officer from 2001 to 2008. In 2008, the year the founders started their second company, she became chief executive, and she ran Ganymed for eight years while Şahin ran BioNTech. This period gets less attention than it deserves. During the years when BioNTech was developing the technology that would later make the founders famous, the established and visible biotech company in the family was Ganymed, and Türeci was the one in charge of it. When Impulse found her at the bistro table in 2011, she was the more prominent entrepreneur of the two.
The patience paid off. In 2016, after a randomized trial showed that zolbetuximab significantly extended overall survival in patients with advanced gastric cancer, Astellas Pharma bought Ganymed for more than €400 million up front, in a deal reported at as much as $1.4 billion. Türeci was the first author of the Phase IIa monotherapy study published in Annals of Oncology in 2019. Fifteen years after the company was founded, the drug was reaching gastric cancer patients. Biotech companies often hold up a single early success as proof of genius. Türeci rarely mentions this one. The antibody from Ganymed is one of the two products, Pi Capital's 2026 speaker biography notes, that her companies have taken all the way from early ideas to people with serious unmet needs. The other is the vaccine.
The Ganymed sale also gave the couple the resources and credibility that would carry BioNTech through the next phase. By then it had been funding and building mRNA science for eight years.
One of Four Technologies
BioNTech was founded in Mainz in 2008. The name is short for Biopharmaceutical New Technologies, and the plural is deliberate. The seed round was €180 million, which is not a seed round in any conventional sense. It came from MIG Capital in Munich, from Helmut Jeggle, who would later chair the supervisory board, and from the family office of Andreas and Thomas Strüngmann. The Strüngmann twins were the billionaire brothers whom Türeci and Şahin had persuaded to invest. They would be paid back many times over, but they also spent more than a decade financing a company that had no approved products.
Asked by the science journalist Kai Kupferschmidt in 2021 when mRNA had become the company's focus, Türeci corrected the premise.
"I would rather say that mRNA is one of our focuses," she said. "As scientist, we are solution‐ and goal‐driven: Our goal is to provide better medicines for patients by harnessing the full potential of the immune system. mRNA has been one of four technologies, which we started to adapt in the early 2000s." The others were antibodies, cell therapies, and small molecules. mRNA, she said, was simply "our most advanced technology."
This could sound like hedging in hindsight. It reflects a temperament instead, and that temperament shaped the company. Şahin had laid out the reasoning in the same interview. When the tumors of two patients with the same type of cancer are compared, they are less than three percent alike and more than ninety-seven percent unique. If every cancer is different, then a company that commits itself to a single kind of drug has chosen its tool before it has defined the problem. The founders' loyalty was to the patient's tumor. The technology was a means.
The tumor did, however, keep pointing toward mRNA, because mRNA is the medium that can be rewritten for each patient. The scientific problems were serious. In her early studies, according to her TED biography, Türeci found that the established ways of delivering mRNA had poor potency and could not produce immune responses strong enough against the encoded target. The molecule was unstable in the body, its protein production was weak and short-lived, and it was hard to get it into the right cells. Over fifteen years the couple's teams improved it step by step. They modified the molecule's backbone and cap structure, varied its chemistry, and tested lipid formulations and routes of administration. A 2006 paper in Blood showed that modifying antigen-encoding RNA increased its stability and translation. In 2016 a paper in Nature showed that RNA could be delivered intravenously to dendritic cells throughout the body. A 2017 Nature paper, with Türeci as last author, reported that personalized RNA vaccines built from the mutations in individual patients' melanomas had mobilized a broad therapeutic immune response.
That 2017 paper deserves attention, because it marked a point that barely registered outside oncology. Starting in 2014, BioNTech had been sequencing patients' tumors, using algorithms to choose which mutations to target, manufacturing an mRNA vaccine for each person, and injecting it. In other words, it was already designing, producing, and giving people a new mRNA medicine within weeks, under clinical trial regulation, as routine. Few people realized what that capability might be used for.
Katalin Karikó joined in 2013. She was a Hungarian biochemist who had found that replacing the nucleoside uridine with a modified version allowed mRNA to enter the body without triggering the inflammatory reaction that had held the field back for years. In the United States she had been demoted and eventually pushed toward retirement, as Ars Technica put it in a headline in October 2023, after she won the Nobel Prize. BioNTech made her a vice president and later a senior vice president, and in 2014 she published a review in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery with Şahin and Türeci titled "mRNA-based therapeutics — developing a new class of drugs." Its claim was ambitious and correct. Karikó and Türeci's father had something in common: each was a foreign professional whose home institutions gave them no place, and each found a role in Germany.
From 2009 to 2018 Türeci chaired BioNTech's scientific advisory board, while running Ganymed and, from 2010, helping to found TRON, the nonprofit translational oncology institute at the Mainz university hospital, and from 2011 chairing Ci3, the federally funded Cluster for Individualized Immune Intervention in the Rhine-Main region. When Ganymed was sold she joined BioNTech's management in 2018 as chief medical officer, responsible for clinical research and development. In August of that year BioNTech signed a multi-year agreement with Pfizer to develop mRNA influenza vaccines. Under its terms Pfizer would take over the program once BioNTech completed the first study in humans. The flu deal looked minor at the time.
The rest came together slowly. A $270 million Series A in January 2018. A $325 million Series B led by Fidelity in July 2019. $55 million from the Gates Foundation that September. In October 2019 a Nasdaq IPO raised only $150 million, less than planned, during a volatile market. Reuters noted the shortfall. In December 2019 the European Investment Bank lent €50 million to finance the patient-specific cancer therapies. Eleven years after its founding, BioNTech was a well-funded, little-known German company with a pipeline full of oncology programs and no approved drug.
— Özlem Türeci, The CNBC Conversation, September 2021And this technology, because we had used it in clinical trials in cancer patients, was already ripe. We knew how to conduct clinical trials with it, how to treat humans with it, and how to set up a manufacturing process.
Friday, January 24
On Friday, January 24, 2020, late in the evening, Uğur Şahin read a paper in The Lancet about a family that had become ill after visiting Wuhan. The paper described person-to-person transmission, including people without symptoms. He turned to his wife. The couple usually argue over scientific papers, he later said, but "there was not too much debate on this paper." By his account, they agreed the world was already in a pandemic. On Monday he told the team that BioNTech might be able to respond.
The publisher's description of the book they later wrote with Joe Miller puts it more plainly: in mid-January 2020, Şahin told Türeci that a vaccine could be developed and safely injected into millions of people before the end of the year. At the time, the record for developing a vaccine against a new pathogen was about four years. "Nobody thought it was possible," the publisher wrote, and that phrase, for once, was hardly an exaggeration.
What followed was named Project Lightspeed. The early decision belonged to Şahin; the later stages were run largely by Türeci. At the start the team built about twenty vaccine candidates, varying the mRNA chemistry, the formulation, and the part of the virus they encoded, either the whole spike protein or a fragment of it. By March five candidates were ready to test in humans. Türeci, as Vox later put it, led the team that narrowed the twenty to one, BNT162b2: a nucleoside-modified mRNA encoding the full spike protein, packaged in a lipid nanoparticle and combining features the couple's laboratories had refined over twenty years of cancer work. A German government profile in February 2021 summarized her job in four verbs. She designed the vaccine studies, selected the active ingredients, coordinated the collaboration with Pfizer, and managed the clinical trials.
Pfizer, already a partner on influenza, signed on in March 2020 for most of the world, while Fosun Pharma took mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau, and BioNTech kept Germany and Turkey for itself. The arrangement, which seemed like a footnote then, would later complicate negotiations with Taiwan. Trials began in Germany in April. The European Investment Bank lent €100 million in June. Temasek put in €250 million the same month. In July the United States ordered $1.95 billion worth of doses. In September Germany's research ministry granted up to €375 million. BioNTech employed people from sixty countries, and Türeci named the international collaboration, with Pfizer and with Fosun, as part of the reason for the speed.
Asked by Chris Anderson to describe those months in one word, she chose "breathless." "It was indeed a breathless 16, 17 months for us," she said. "What was not known was how fast this pandemic would evolve and whether we would have the time in the first place to have a vaccine ready soon enough in due time. And understanding this, it meant for us that there was not even one day to lose."
The data came in on Monday, November 9, 2020. In a Phase 3 study of 43,538 people, the vaccine had prevented more than ninety percent of COVID-19 cases among the first 94 cases counted. Within ten days the final analysis, based on 170 cases, showed 95 percent efficacy. BioNTech was valued at about $21.9 billion that week. Şahin, the Guardian observed, was still cycling to the office. He called the result "a victory for innovation, science and of a global collaborative effort."
The announcement came two days after the U.S. presidential election was called. The outgoing president suggested the timing was political. On Kara Swisher's Sway podcast in December, Türeci answered for the couple, and her answer had nothing to do with politics. It was a description of procedure.
— Özlem Türeci, on Sway, December 2020Clinical trials are highly regulated. And this is something which you cannot really delay or stop or expedite.
The protocol, in other words, had decided the date. Britain authorized the vaccine on December 2, 2020, and the first injection outside a trial was given days later at a hospital in Coventry. The United States followed about a week later, and the European Union granted conditional approval on December 21. In August 2021 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration fully approved Comirnaty, the first mRNA medicine of any kind to receive such approval in the United States. BioNTech's market value briefly exceeded $100 billion.
At the Atlantic Council a year after the efficacy data, she and her husband were asked what would have happened if the virus had appeared in 2019. The Council's summary of their answer: "we might not have been in the position to respond this fast." The cancer vaccines had prepared the company for the pandemic. The individualized melanoma vaccines and the dendritic-cell delivery, financed in part by the profits of an antibody business, had amounted to a rehearsal that nobody had planned.
The Woman Has No Name
The fame came all at once and was hard to control. Across both countries, newspapers celebrated the couple's success, often with an edge in the praise. In Germany, the story was framed as proof of something about integration, with Turkish-German children celebrated as model citizens. In Turkey, it was framed as proof of something about Turkishness. The Guardian reported that they were the first Germans of Turkish descent to enter the country's rich list, at number 93. Politico Europe, ranking her in its 2021 class of the twenty-eight most influential people in Europe, wrote that the couple embodied "the 'American dream' auf Deutsch" and joked that she was on track for Nobel Prizes in Medicine and Peace, and maybe Economics too.
The same Politico entry recorded the other side. In the days after the November announcement, Google had to correct its search results so that they stopped identifying Türeci as the "wife of" Şahin. Der Spiegel had written about it under a headline asking how Google turns a vaccine researcher into a "wife." The correction was made. The habit persisted.
On Friday, July 9, 2021, after Friday prayers in Diyarbakır, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that the BioNTech founders would soon visit Turkey. "Soon Dr. Uğur Şahin and his spouse will be our guests," he said. Turkish social media responded immediately. Users quoted the title of Duygu Asena's 1987 feminist novel, Kadının Adı Yok: The Woman Has No Name. "Is being the spouse of Uğur Şahin the only thing that defines who the academic and scientist Özlem Türeci is?" asked the former politician Aylin Kotil. The secularist website Odatv asked, half rhetorically, whether the president had simply forgotten her name.
Türeci said nothing about it in public, as far as the record shows. That silence is consistent with everything else she did. Her refusal to fight over attribution was also a way of keeping control of how she was presented, and the couple showed it in other ways. In February 2022 they declined the Atatürkist Thought Association's "Atatürkist of the Year" award. They had accepted the Aydın Doğan Award, given by a foundation linked to a media family, the year before. Turkish commentators tried to read meaning into the difference, as Turkish commentators do. One plausible reading is that the couple were declining to be recruited into someone else's political identity, whether ethnic, national, or ideological, and to the extent they accepted any role, it was one defined by their work.
The money was handled in a similar way. The couple were now billionaires on paper. Bloomberg estimated Şahin's net worth at $7.22 billion in February 2022. They continued to live as before. The Washington Post, in November 2020, reported that they did not own a car. Vox reported that they commuted by bicycle and worked long hours in the lab. On a video call to Sabancı University's graduating class in July 2021, at a ceremony in Istanbul, Türeci named the three virtues she said had guided them through the long years: courage, humility, and perseverance. A professor commenting on the university's LinkedIn post called it "sage advice from a modest scientist," and that is the tone the couple maintained.
The modesty was sincere, and it also worked as protection. A person with no visible luxuries is hard to accuse of greed, and a person who refuses symbolic roles is hard to enlist in other people's causes. It did not, however, make her name any easier to remember. The table at the front of the Proviant-Magazin had been a small, deliberate act, and it was the kind of act that now had to be repeated in public, on a scale she had never sought.
In March 2021 the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, gave Türeci and Şahin the Knight Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit, at Bellevue Palace, with Angela Merkel in attendance. Merkel, a chemist by training, had said that December: "We are incredibly proud to have such researchers in our country." A wire photograph from the ceremony shows the chancellor listening, intently, to Özlem Türeci. "Both my husband and I are touched," Türeci told reporters, and then immediately credited "the effort of many."
Fifty-Four Euros and Eight Cents
The sums that came with success brought scrutiny, and some of it was justified.
In February 2021, German public broadcasters NDR and WDR and the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that BioNTech's first offer to the European Union, in June 2020, had been €54.08 per dose. The chair of the German Medical Association's drug commission called it "dubious." BioNTech replied that the figure was never meant as a real price. It reflected production costs before mass manufacturing and before the dose had been set. The federal government, oddly, defended the company, saying everyone had understood the figure as a status report and not an offer. By August 2021 the price per dose had been set at €19.50, justified in part by the need to adapt the vaccine to new variants. Critics said BioNTech was simply using its dominant market position.
Beyond the price was the matter of distribution. The vaccine had to be stored below minus seventy degrees Celsius, which Politico pointed out made it poorly suited to poorer countries. "Türeci may have to wait a bit on that Peace prize," the magazine added. In May 2021, during a sharp outbreak in Taiwan, President Tsai Ing-wen accused the company of demanding that the phrase "our country" be removed from a draft contract. Fosun held exclusive marketing rights for the region, and some saw that legal arrangement, not pressure from Beijing, as the reason the deal failed. No contract was signed.
At the Falling Walls Science Summit in Berlin in November 2021, Daniel A. Gross of Vox put the global access problem to her directly. By then, the great majority of the Pfizer-BioNTech doses had gone to high-income countries, home to roughly 16 percent of the world's population. Gross quoted Maaza Seyoum of the People's Vaccine Alliance: "It is obscene that just a few companies are making millions of dollars in profit every single hour, while just 2.5 percent of people in low-income countries have been fully vaccinated against coronavirus." Türeci's answers in that interview were the most defensive she gave during the pandemic. That is not surprising. Her company's partnership with Pfizer had made the vaccine available at a speed no small German company could have achieved alone. The price of that arrangement was handing the distribution decisions to a large company whose obligations ran to its shareholders.
Publicly, the couple and Pfizer adopted a slogan, which Türeci repeated in Thessaloniki: "No one will be safe until everyone is safe, across nations, ethnicities, and economies." Their more concrete response came later. In February 2022 BioNTech introduced the BioNTainer, a modular mRNA production facility built inside shipping containers. The first BioNTainer site opened in Kigali, Rwanda, in December 2023. It was intended to produce vaccines in Africa, for African use, and it was also an admission that the earlier model had not worked for everyone.
During this period Türeci also continued explaining how the vaccine worked, in plain language suited to a general audience. She likened the spike protein the vaccine instructs cells to make to a wanted poster, a picture shown to the immune system so it will recognize the real virus. In September 2021 she told CNBC that COVID "will become manageable. It already has started to become manageable," and that the virus would remain with us for some years yet. She described the company running "dry runs" for adapting the vaccine to new variants, rehearsing together with regulators, "so that they are also prepared for the potential need to switch." The emphasis, again, was on preparing in advance.
Wanderers Between Worlds
The Empress Theophano Prize was presented in the Rotunda of Thessaloniki, a fourth-century building that has been a Roman temple, a Byzantine church, and an Ottoman mosque. Stefan Stern, who attended for Prospect, described the setting: a warm evening, Greek dignitaries, the Greek and European flags behind two German citizens of Turkish descent, in a city that had belonged to many nations and been made great by migration. Theophano, the prize's namesake, was a Byzantine princess who married into the Holy Roman Empire in the tenth century and became regent of the Ottonian empire. She was, as Türeci said in her acceptance speech, "a strong, visionary woman who walked between worlds to bridge them."
Then Türeci said something about herself, which was rare for her.
"For Ugur and I," she said, "pursuing this grand vision meant becoming wanderers between worlds, 3 worlds: As trained physicians, the patient care is vitally important; as scientists, we are deeply rooted in academia; as entrepreneurs and founders, we are immersed in the biopharma industry and the private sector."
The three worlds she named were professional: the clinic, the laboratory, the company. But the phrase "wanderers between worlds" is common in German discussions of migrant children, and it is hard to believe she did not have that meaning in mind too. She herself had grown up between Lastrup and Fındıklı, between a Muslim father and Catholic nuns, between Prussian and Turkish. A person raised that way gets used to belonging to several places without fully belonging to any of them, and that kind of life can turn into a talent for translation. BioNTech's corporate slogan, which became the title of her later lectures, is "translating science into survival." The choice of the word "translating" seems deliberate.
In December 2021 she accepted a professorship of Personalized Immunotherapy at the Helmholtz Institute for Translational Oncology in Mainz, known as HI-TRON, a partnership between the German Cancer Research Center and the Mainz university system. It was unusual for a billionaire chief medical officer of a publicly traded company to take up an academic chair. She described what she wanted the division to do in the same terms she had used for decades: "For me, ensuring that our results reach the patients quickly is one of the key goals, so we will be consistently gearing our research toward translation." The lab's research areas show that she remained committed to more than one technology: targeted mRNA delivery to revive exhausted T cells, the interaction of antibody-drug conjugates with the immune system, and Claudin 18.2, the target from Ganymed, which she was still studying more than twenty years after she found it.
In June 2024 she returned to the American Society of Clinical Oncology's annual meeting in Chicago after a seven-year absence. The pandemic, as Kyle LaHucik of Endpoints News noted, had taken up her time. She talked with him about antibody-drug conjugates, which she called "hip," and about the importance of combining therapies. The chief medical officer of the world's best-known mRNA company had come to the field's largest meeting mainly to talk about other kinds of drugs. Anyone who remembered her correction to Kai Kupferschmidt, that mRNA was "one of our focuses," would not have been surprised.
The ceremonies continued: honorary doctorates in Cologne, Marburg, Amsterdam, and Antwerp; the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize, presented in Frankfurt's Paulskirche; honorary citizenship of Mainz in March 2022, shared with Huber; a vote in the Federal Assembly that elected Germany's president, nominated by the Social Democrats of Rhineland-Palatinate; the state dinner for King Charles III at Bellevue Palace on March 29, 2023; the Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts the same year. In October 2023 the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Katalin Karikó and her longtime collaborator Drew Weissman, not to Mainz. Karikó had been a BioNTech senior vice president until she became an external adviser. If the omission bothered the couple, they kept it private. Neither has ever complained in public about how credit was assigned.
What Was Not Envisioned
Revenue from the vaccine fell as the pandemic faded. The Times put it bluntly in a headline: that cash cow has been milked dry. In 2025 BioNTech reported revenue of €2.87 billion, an operating loss of €1.40 billion, and a net loss of €1.14 billion, while spending €2.1 billion on research and development. The company used its accumulated cash to build an oncology business by acquisition. It bought InstaDeep, a British artificial intelligence company, in 2023. It bought Biotheus, a Chinese biotech, for about $1 billion in December 2024, gaining full rights to a bispecific antibody targeting PD-L1 and VEGF-A. In June 2025 it bought CureVac, its German rival from the vaccine race, for about $1.25 billion in stock. The same month it agreed a deal with Bristol Myers Squibb worth up to $11 billion to develop that bispecific antibody. The company's oncology strategy combines three types of treatment, mRNA cancer immunotherapies, next-generation immunomodulators, and targeted therapies, which is close to the multi-technology portfolio Türeci had described to Kupferschmidt in 2021.
Not every program has worked. BNT122-01, a Phase 2 trial of autogene cevumeran, BioNTech's individualized mRNA cancer vaccine developed with Genentech, tested whether the vaccine alone could prevent recurrence in colorectal cancer patients whose tumors had been removed but who still had tumor DNA in their blood. It was designed to enroll about 327 patients. The trial crossed its futility boundary in October 2025. An independent monitoring board later found a numerical imbalance in overall survival between the groups, and BioNTech ended the study. A Genentech spokesperson told Fierce Biotech that more patients had died in the vaccine group. BioNTech's statement, issued in Türeci's name, did not use the word "failure."
— Özlem Türeci, on the termination of the BNT122-01 colorectal cancer trialWhile this outcome is not what we had envisioned for mRNA as a monotherapy in colorectal cancer, it provides scientific insight into the challenges of treating immunotherapy-insensitive tumor types with immune-suppressive microenvironments and will help inform the further development of investigational mRNA cancer immunotherapies.
The statement is careful and correct, and it leaves out the emotion that must have accompanied it. Colorectal cancer is a "cold" tumor, one the immune system largely ignores, and the trial had tested the vaccine alone, without a checkpoint inhibitor, against watchful waiting. It was the most difficult version of the question. One can read the result as a narrow finding that this technology may need a partner drug, or as a setback for the idea that each patient's own mutations can be turned into a cure. The statement allows both readings. In 1995 a vaccine tailored to each patient's tumor was, in Şahin's word, crazy. In 2021 Türeci said, "It still is." She had not been joking.
On March 10, 2026, Die Welt reported that Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci would leave BioNTech by the end of the year to found a new biotechnology company. That same day, in the Paranimf of the University of Barcelona, Türeci received an honorary doctorate from the rector, sponsored by the dean of the medical faculty. The video archive lists the ceremony in Catalan. Two months later, BioNTech announced it would end COVID-19 vaccine production in Germany and transfer it to Pfizer, closing its sites in Marburg, Idar-Oberstein, and Singapore along with several former CureVac sites. Der Spiegel reported that 1,860 jobs were at risk.
The founders who had once been seen as Germany's answer to American biotech had built a large public company. Now they were leaving it to its board, its commercial officers, and its restructuring, and starting again. Pi Capital's description of a breakfast talk she was scheduled to give at 7:45 on the morning of October 8, 2026, under the title "How to translate science into survival," describes her next company in a single line: a third company "at the intersection of personalized immunotherapies, AI and mRNA technology." That is personalized immunotherapy again, the idea from the cancer ward in Homburg, now with machine learning added, and still not proven.
It is tempting to conclude that the ambition was always bigger than the modesty, that the bistro table was only a pose. That would be too simple. The table at the front was not a pose and it was not mere self-effacement. She sat where she could be seen, ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, and asked for nothing more. She has made the same choices for forty years, under different headlines.
In Lastrup, St. Elisabeth-Stift still stands across from the small house where her father kept his practice. It is still a hospital. The sisters still run it, in white.
Part IIThe Playbook
The principles below are drawn from the record above: the hospital ward, the two companies, the vaccine trial, the failed colorectal study, and the decision to leave. They are not a recipe for discovering a vaccine. They describe how one physician-founder spent three decades turning a clinical problem into institutions that could solve it, and how she kept her temperament intact while doing it.
The Türeci Playbook
- 1.Let the unsolved patient write the strategy.
- 2.Be loyal to the problem, not the platform.
- 3.Fund the radical bet with the legible one.
- 4.Ripen your technology on a harder problem.
- 5.Decide in a weekend; execute by protocol.
- 6.Build twenty, choose one.
- 7.Rent scale; own the science.
- 8.Hire the people institutions overlooked.
- 9.Divide the partnership along temperament.
- 10.Be modest about yourself, never about your name.
- 11.Report failure in the language of insight.
- 12.Leave when the institution no longer needs your doubt.
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Decision Timeline
The key decisions, in order, from the ward in Homburg to the third company.
1992
Finishes medical training in Homburg; meets Uğur Şahin on an oncohematology ward.
2000
Moves to Mainz with Şahin, recruited by Christoph Huber.
2001
Co-founds Ganymed on antibodies against self-discovered tumor targets; serves as CSO.
2008
Co-founds BioNTech; becomes CEO of Ganymed.
2013
BioNTech hires Katalin Karikó as vice president.
2016
Ganymed sold to Astellas, reported at up to $1.4B.
2018
Becomes BioNTech CMO; Pfizer influenza deal signed.
2020
Project Lightspeed: 20 candidates to one; 95% efficacy; first authorizations.
2021
Accepts HI-TRON professorship of Personalized Immunotherapy.
2026
Departure from BioNTech announced; third company planned.
Principle 1
Let the unsolved patient write the strategy
Türeci tells the origin of every enterprise she has founded the same way. It starts on a ward, with a patient for whom nothing more can be done. "We too often had to tell our cancer patients that there were no more treatment options for them." That sentence comes before the science and before the companies, and everything else follows from it. The hospital in Lastrup, the oncohematology ward in Homburg, the HI-TRON professorship explicitly aimed at "translation": each step keeps a dying patient at the center of the picture.
This matters for strategy. A company that starts from a technology looks for problems it can solve. A company that starts from a clinical failure looks for whatever tool will work, which is why BioNTech spent its first decade developing four technologies at once. Starting from the patient also sets the right deadline. Pharmaceutical companies often set timelines around trials and reporting quarters. The patient's illness moves on its own schedule regardless.
The vaccine shows the advantage. When the Lancet paper arrived, the couple did not have to decide whether to act. The patient, now the whole world, had already made the question urgent, and the organization had been built to respond to that kind of urgency.
Tactic: Write down the specific clinical, customer, or human failure your organization exists to fix, and test every major decision against whether it shortens the distance to that bedside.
Principle 2
Be loyal to the problem, not the platform
When Kai Kupferschmidt tried to call her an mRNA company founder, she corrected him: "mRNA is one of our focuses." It was one of four technologies BioNTech had been adapting since the early 2000s, alongside antibodies, cell therapies, and small molecules. In 2024 she spent her return to ASCO talking about antibody-drug conjugates. Her HI-TRON lab still studies Claudin 18.2, the antibody target from her first company.
There are two benefits to holding back from a single platform. The first is resilience. When mRNA alone failed in colorectal cancer, BioNTech still had bispecific antibodies, ADCs, and a combination strategy to fall back on. The second is less obvious: committing to one technology narrows what a team is able to notice. A company that thinks of itself as an mRNA company will tend to see every problem as an mRNA problem. A company devoted to the immune system can see when mRNA is the wrong tool.
Şahin's figure that tumors are more than 97 percent unique justifies this approach. If the problem keeps changing, the tool must be able to change with it.
Tactic: Describe your company by the problem it attacks rather than the method it uses, and fund at least one serious alternative approach for as long as the main one is unproven.
Principle 3
Fund the radical bet with the legible one
In 2001 investors would not fund an mRNA cancer vaccine. "Early research without clinical evidence," Türeci said in Thessaloniki, did not attract money. So the founders started Ganymed on monoclonal antibodies, a type of drug investors had understood for twenty years, aimed at targets they had discovered themselves. She raised more than €115 million for it, a German record at the time. Ganymed then supported the founders while BioNTech developed its riskier technology, and in 2016 its sale gave them money, credibility, and a record of delivery when BioNTech needed them.
This is a two-company strategy, and it should be distinguished from simply doing two things at once. The conventional company served the unconventional one. It also taught Türeci how to run a company, raise money, and manage a clinical program, years before her second company faced the most watched clinical trial in history.
Tactic: If your real ambition is too early to finance, build a fundable venture next to it whose success also builds the credibility, cash, and operating skill the ambitious one will need.
Principle 4
Ripen your technology on a harder problem
"Because we had used it in clinical trials in cancer patients, [it] was already ripe," Türeci told CNBC. "We knew how to conduct clinical trials with it, how to treat humans with it, and how to set up a manufacturing process." Starting in 2014, BioNTech had been making a separate mRNA vaccine for each melanoma patient, sequencing tumors and manufacturing personalized treatments on short timelines under clinical regulation. A vaccine for a single, known virus was simpler than that.
Many teams prepare for difficult problems by first solving easy ones. Türeci's route went the other way, and the hardest version of the problem prepared the company for an easier, and far more urgent, one. Personalized cancer immunotherapy required speed, flexible manufacturing, and close work with regulators. A pandemic needed all three. The founders' answer to whether they could have responded a year earlier, "we might not have been in the position", acknowledges that the timing was lucky. It also shows how long the preparation took.
Tactic: Run your core capability against the most demanding use case you can find, so that when an easier, larger opportunity arrives, you are already prepared for it.
Principle 5
Decide in a weekend; execute by protocol
The decision took one weekend. Şahin read the Lancet paper on Friday, January 24, 2020. "There was not too much debate," and by Monday the team had been told. Everything after that followed the regulatory rules, with no shortcuts. When the efficacy data arrived two days after the U.S. election was called and the outgoing president alleged political timing, Türeci answered by explaining procedure: "Clinical trials are highly regulated. And this is something which you cannot really delay or stop or expedite."
Being fast and being rigorous are often treated as a trade-off. Here they applied at different stages. The strategic choice could be made quickly because it rested on twenty years of preparation. The trial, which tested an unproven product in human beings, could not be rushed and was not. Where time could be saved, it was saved by running steps in parallel and by having regulators rehearse, never by lowering the standard of evidence.
Tactic: Separate the decision to commit from the process of execution, make the first quickly, and apply your strictest standards to the second.
Principle 6
Build twenty, choose one
Project Lightspeed began with about twenty vaccine candidates that varied in chemistry, formulation, and which part of the virus they encoded. Five were ready for human testing by March. Türeci's team narrowed them to one, BNT162b2. Building many options and then rigorously choosing among them is how a team covers its uncertainty: by testing every reasonable answer at the same time, it avoids staking everything on its first guess.
The cost is effort spent on candidates that are discarded. The gain is that the selected candidate was chosen on clinical evidence in humans, not on the team's preference. During a pandemic, every wrong choice would have cost months. Testing in parallel turned those months into weeks.
Tactic: When the stakes are high and the right answer is unclear, fund several parallel candidates through the first real test, and decide in advance what result will eliminate each one.
Principle 7
Rent scale; own the science
BioNTech could not have manufactured and distributed billions of doses, run a global trial with more than forty thousand participants, and negotiated with dozens of governments all at once. So it partnered: with Pfizer for most of the world, with Fosun for China, while keeping Germany and Turkey for itself. The Pfizer relationship had begun with a modest 2018 influenza agreement, so a working relationship already existed when the crisis came. Türeci personally coordinated the scientific collaboration.
The arrangement had costs. Pfizer's commercial priorities shaped distribution, which drew criticism of the vaccine gap. Fosun's rights complicated the Taiwan negotiations. But BioNTech retained ownership of its science, its platform, and the profits, which later financed CureVac, Biotheus, and the oncology pipeline. The lesson is to know which assets must stay in your hands and which can be rented, and to accept the drawbacks of the rented ones.
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Conventional Biotech Playbook vs. Türeci's Approach
How the record above differs from the usual way of building a biotech company.
| Conventional approach | Türeci's approach | Phase |
|---|---|---|
| Pick a platform and market the company around it. | Develop four technologies; call mRNA "one of our focuses." | Founding |
| Raise money for the boldest idea first. | Raise money for antibodies; use Ganymed to support mRNA. | Ganymed |
| Start with an easy indication. | Start with individualized cancer vaccines. | BioNTech |
| Bet on the lead candidate. | Build twenty candidates and select one on human data. | Lightspeed |
| Use success to build personal visibility. | Stay modest, keep cycling, take an academic chair. | Fame |
| Bury negative trials in a press release. | Explain a terminated trial in its own terms. | Setback |
| Founders stay until forced out. | Leave voluntarily to start a third company. | Transition |
Tactic: List the assets that create your long-term value and keep ownership of them; for everything else, choose partners early, before you need them urgently.
Principle 8
Hire the people institutions overlooked
Katalin Karikó came to BioNTech in 2013 after an American career that had stalled. Her discovery about modified uridine, the key to mRNA that does not provoke inflammation, had been underappreciated. BioNTech made her a vice president. Ten years later she shared a Nobel Prize for the work. Türeci's own father had a similar story: a Turkish surgeon who left a system with no good place for him and became the only doctor for a German farming region.
People who have been underestimated by large institutions often bring skills those institutions failed to see, and they tend to commit fully to the organization that finally recognizes them. Şahin described their approach to building teams as rooted in academic mentorship: "As a scientist what you first do is educate and teach your students." Hiring someone overlooked is partly a judgment call, but it reflects the same attentiveness to people that good teaching requires.
Tactic: Look specifically for people whose ideas were right too early for their former institutions, and give them real authority, not a token position.
Principle 9
Divide the partnership along temperament
The exchange in Thessaloniki shows the arrangement in three lines. Şahin: "this was a crazy idea." Türeci: "It still is." Şahin: "But now we are much closer." He tends to speak in terms of vision, and she tends to qualify it. He read the Lancet paper and made the decision. She designed the studies, chose the active ingredients, and ran the trials. For eight years she ran Ganymed while he ran BioNTech, and each was the other's most trusted critic.
Founder partnerships are often divided by job title. This one was divided by temperament, which is more durable. Each role suits the person in it, so the partnership does not depend on either person changing who they are. The couple's habit of arguing over scientific papers is part of how they work. On the one paper where they found nothing to argue about, the January 2020 Lancet report, they knew immediately that it was serious.
Tactic: Assign co-founder roles based on how each person naturally thinks, one more inclined to push forward and one more inclined to scrutinize, and treat their disagreements as a check on decisions.
Principle 10
Be modest about yourself, never about your name
At the Proviant-Magazin she ordered the €8.20 lunch special and asked for mineral water only "if it's no trouble," and she also chose the table where she could not be forgotten. Throughout her career she has combined both impulses: no car, a bicycle, sandwiches at her desk, an academic chair; and she has also insisted on being a founder, a chief executive, and the person who led the trials. Google's "wife" label and Erdoğan's "his spouse" were not corrected by her complaining. They were corrected by the public record of her work, which made the mistake obvious.
The modesty serves her too. It makes accusations of greed less credible, keeps her out of political and symbolic roles she does not want, and keeps the attention on the work. But modesty about one's lifestyle is different from modesty about one's contribution. She practices the first. She does not practice the second.
Tactic: Keep your personal style simple, and make sure your title, your authorship, and your decision rights are documented so that nobody can mistake your role.
Principle 11
Report failure in the language of insight
When the colorectal trial was stopped, the statement issued in her name did not overstate the failure or hide it. It defined it precisely: "not what we had envisioned for mRNA as a monotherapy in colorectal cancer." It explained the result: immunotherapy-insensitive tumors with immune-suppressive microenvironments. And it pointed to what comes next: combination strategies. The narrow scope of the statement is the point. It acknowledges failure in one indication without declaring the whole approach dead or claiming the setback was minor.
This is how a scientist talks to the public. It treats a negative result as evidence, which it is, and it holds readers to the standard of reading a result as narrowly as the data allow. Organizations that hide their failures lose credibility. Organizations that dramatize them lose confidence. Türeci's approach avoids both.
Tactic: When something fails, state exactly what failed and under what conditions, what you learned, and what you will try next, and nothing more.
Principle 12
Leave when the institution no longer needs your doubt
In March 2026, the founders announced that they would leave BioNTech by the end of the year to start a third company. In May, BioNTech announced plans to shut down its German COVID vaccine production and close several sites. The company had become a large, publicly traded oncology business with a commercial officer from Novartis and Bristol-Myers Squibb, a structure of acquisitions, and a restructuring underway. The work there had become about managing scale. Türeci's next company is described as being "at the intersection of personalized immunotherapies, AI and mRNA technology" which takes her back to the uncertain, early-stage question she has pursued since the 1990s.
Her best work has come early in a company's life, when its central bet is still unproven. "It still is" crazy, she said in 2021, and she seems to prefer it that way. Founders who stay after a company has matured often end up defending past decisions. Founders who leave at the right point can return to the early-stage risk where they are most useful.
Tactic: Identify the stage of an organization's life where your judgment adds the most value, and plan your exit for when the company has moved beyond it.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Özlem Türeci, EMBO Molecular Medicine interview with Kai Kupferschmidt, 2021As scientist, we are solution‐ and goal‐driven: Our goal is to provide better medicines for patients by harnessing the full potential of the immune system.
— Özlem Türeci, TED interview with Chris Anderson, 2021Well, one word which comes to mind is breathless. It was indeed a breathless 16, 17 months for us.
— Özlem Türeci, on joining HI-TRON Mainz, December 2021For me, ensuring that our results reach the patients quickly is one of the key goals, so we will be consistently gearing our research toward translation.
— Özlem Türeci, on vaccine safety, March 2021There is a very rigid process in place and the process does not stop after a vaccine has been approved.
— Özlem Türeci, Empress Theophano Prize acceptance speech, Thessaloniki, 2021This day, this award, is about recognizing that the most noble purpose of science is to serve humanity – first and foremost.
Maxims
- Start at the bedside. The patient who has run out of options defines the problem; the technology comes afterward.
- Treat the platform as a tool. Be loyal to the disease you are fighting, not to the method you happen to be using.
- Let the fundable venture support the radical one. A conventional business can finance and train you for an unconventional one.
- Prepare on the hardest problem. Capabilities proven on the most difficult case are ready when an easier, larger need arrives.
- Decide quickly and execute by protocol. Commit in a weekend; let no deadline override the standards of evidence.
- Build several, choose on evidence. Running candidates in parallel turns uncertainty into a selection based on data.
- Hire the overlooked. People whose ideas came too early for their old institutions can be the most committed in a new one.
- Divide work by temperament. Pair the person who pushes forward with the person who scrutinizes, and value their disagreements.
- Keep the lifestyle modest and the record exact. Live simply, but make sure your role and contribution are documented.
- Describe failure precisely. A negative result stated accurately is evidence; exaggerated or hidden, it costs credibility.
