[News Inside] From Dirt Spoon to Billionaire Riding the Pandemic Wave

BioNTech Co-Founders Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci Couple

[Image source=Reuters Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Kwon Jae-hee] There is a person who created a success story amid an unprecedented catastrophe.

They are Ugur Sahin, co-founder and CEO of BioNTech, a German pharmaceutical company that developed the COVID-19 vaccine, and his wife, Dr. ?zlem T?reci.

The Sahin couple grew up as second-generation immigrants in a family of migrant workers in Germany, so-called "dirt spoons."

The German local media Tagesspiegel even described their success as "a remarkable achievement of Turkish immigrants, who were once considered low-educated and worked in fruit and vegetable stores."

The couple comes from a Turkish migrant worker family and got married in 2002 after graduating from medical school.

So dedicated to research that they even held their wedding in a laboratory wearing lab coats, the couple founded BioNTech in 2008.

In fact, BioNTech was almost unknown before the COVID-19 pandemic. BioNTech's global fame is thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Sahin couple succeeded in developing a vaccine just nine months after the outbreak.

The turning point in their lives came in January last year, when COVID-19 had just begun to spread. The Sahin couple read a paper that first identified the possibility of human-to-human transmission of COVID-19, but they focused on a different point: the case of a 7-year-old asymptomatic infected girl mentioned in the paper.

▲BioNTech co-founder Dr. Ugur Sahin (left) and his wife, U?ur T?reci (right)

In an interview with the UK Telegraph, Dr. Sahin said, "Through the asymptomatic infection case, I realized that COVID-19 was already metastasizing like cancer cells," and "I was certain that COVID-19 would become a global pandemic."

Thus, the Sahin couple immediately began developing a COVID-19 vaccine and succeeded in developing it within nine months.

However, the process was not smooth. Dr. Sahin proposed joint development of the COVID-19 vaccine to Pfizer, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, but was flatly rejected.

At that time, the Pfizer official who received the proposal was Phil Dormitzer, Pfizer's Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer for Vaccine Development. He later recalled, "I thought COVID-19 would end quickly like Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)," and admitted, "It was my misjudgment."

Undeterred by the rejection, Dr. Sahin proposed again, and thus BioNTech and Pfizer jointly succeeded in developing the COVID-19 vaccine.

So far, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has been sold in over 120 countries, and it is estimated to generate $36 billion (about 42.4 trillion KRW) in sales this year and $29 billion (about 34.1 trillion KRW) next year. Through this, the once unknown BioNTech instantly became a global company worth $85 billion (about 100 trillion KRW).

The Sahin couple became billionaires overnight, but they still have dreams and goals they have not yet achieved. One of them is developing a malaria treatment vaccine.

Dr. Sahin expressed his ambition, saying, "Malaria is the worst infectious disease that most affects children," and "I want to invest the money earned from the COVID vaccine into developing new vaccines to treat malaria and other diseases."