City profile

Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci

When the founders of BioNTech picked a street called An der Goldgrube (At the Goldmine) in the German city of Mainz for their HQ, they little knew “how prophetic” the address would become, said Philip Oltermann in The Guardian. Following this week’s Covid vaccine breakthrough, the married scientists may now be worth £3bn: BioNTech’s US-listed shares shot up 23.4% on Monday, taking the company’s total value to $21.9bn. Since Dr Sahin (below left), 55, and Dr Türeci, 53, are both children of Turkish “guest workers”, their success, as the Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel noted, was “balm for the soul” of Germans with Turkish roots – after decades of being stereotyped as lowly educated greengrocers.

Still, the couple – who met at Homburg’s Saarland University Hospital, and set up BioNTech in 2008 with the Austrian oncologist Christoph Huber – have always been motivated by “medicine, not money”, said The Times. When they got married in 2002, the couple began the day in lab coats, and “after a brief interlude at the register office”, immediately resumed their research. Most of their work has been at the “cutting-edge of cancer medicine”, training the immune system to cut out tumours. But when Covid-19 surfaced, they reallocated resources and teamed up with Pfizer, with whom they had worked on flu vaccines. In keeping with the customs of the German super-rich, the couple keep a modest public profile. Sahin is said to avoid checking the company’s share price. He may not have been able to avoid it this week.