Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci: German ‘dream team’ behind vaccine

They are the “dream team” scientist couple who came up with a big idea that could protect humanity from a virus that has killed more than a million people and put an end to a pandemic that has upended economies across the globe.

But as the world breathed a sigh of relief at Monday’s news that the experimental vaccine developed by German biotech company BioNTech and US pharmaceutical company Pfizer has shown positive results in the all-important phase 3 trials, Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci displayed characteristic modesty.

BioNTech chief executive, Şahin, known for still cycling on bike to the headquarters of a company currently valued at $21.9bn (£16.6bn), said the trial results were above all a “victory for innovation, science and of a global collaborative effort”, which might hopefully help the world “regain a sense of normalcy”.

The comments hinted at the scientific rigour, unrelenting work ethic and appetite for entrepreneurship that has seen Sahin and Türeci’s company outpace more well-established competitors in the race for a Covid-19 vaccine – and made the couple the first Germans with Turkish roots to enter their country’s rich list this autumn, at number 93.

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Both scientists are the children of Turkish migrants who moved to Germany in the late 1960s. Şahin, 55, was born in İskenderun on the Mediterranean coast but moved to Germany as a four-year-old, where his father worked at the Ford factory in Cologne.

Fifty-three-year-old Türeci, BioNTech’s chief medical officer, grew up in Lastrup, Lower Saxony, where her Istanbul-born father worked as a surgeon at a small Catholic hospital.

For both, cross-pollinating cultures proved dynamic childhood environments: Türeci has described herself as a “Prussian Turk” and spoken in interviews of her admiration for the nuns who looked after patients at her father’s hospital, while football-fan Şahin found inspiration in popular science books he took out from the library at his local church.

After gaining his doctor with a thesis on immunotherapy treatment for cancer cells, Şahin followed his PhD supervisor to Saarland University in the town of Homburg, where Türeci was studying medicine.

The couple married in 2002, interrupting their research only briefly to slip out of their lab coats and dash to the registry office on their wedding day. Their daughter was born four years later.

Since 2001, Şahin and Türeci have been based in Mainz, a city on the river Rhine famous for its carnival culture and as the home of Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the movable-type printing press.

The two scientists showed a similar enterprising zeal. At Mainz university hospital, the couple planned to set up a research lab to investigate how immune systems could be trained to attack cancerous cells. When research funds were hard to come by “we simply started our own company”, Şahin told news portal Heise.