Uğur Şahin

Uğur Şahin (born 19 September 1965 in İskenderun, Turkey) is a Turkish-German immunologist and professor of oncology, chief executive and co-founder of the German company BioNTech, which with Pfizer developed the first mRNA vaccine approved for human use, against COVID-19. ^{1 2}

He describes himself as an "immune engineer", is co-inventor on more than 500 patent applications and patents, and chairs the scientific management board of HI-TRON, the Helmholtz Institute for Translational Oncology, which he co-founded in 2018. ^{1 2}

He was born in İskenderun into a Turkish family and moved with his mother to Germany at the age of four, joining his father, who worked at Ford's factories in Cologne. His primary-school teacher recommended a Hauptschule, a school track that would not readily have led to university; a German neighbour intervened and he went to a Gymnasium instead, took advanced courses in mathematics and chemistry, and graduated from the Erich-Kästner-Gymnasium in Cologne-Niehl in 1984 — the first child at the school of Turkish guest-worker parents. ¹

He studied medicine at the University of Cologne (1984–1992) and took his doctorate in 1992, summa cum laude, with a thesis on immunotherapy against tumour cells (bispecific monoclonal antibodies), supervised by Michael Pfreundschuh; he also studied mathematics at the Fernuniversität Hagen (1992–94). ¹

He worked as a physician in internal medicine and haematology/oncology from 1991 to 2000, at University Hospital Cologne under Volker Diehl and then at Saarland University Hospital in Homburg, and took his habilitation in 1999 in molecular medicine and immunology. After a sabbatical in 2000 with Hans Hengartner in Zürich, he joined Christoph Huber at the University Medical Center Mainz, heading a research group from 2000, chairing the Tumor Vaccine Center from 2003, becoming professor of experimental oncology in 2006 and a W3 professor in 2014, and serving as deputy director of the university's UCT Mainz. At Homburg he met Özlem Türeci in her final year of medical studies; they married in 2002 and had a daughter four years later. ¹

In 2001 he co-founded Ganymed Pharmaceuticals with Türeci and Huber; the company developed zolbetuximab for gastric and gastro-oesophageal cancer and was sold to Astellas Pharma in 2016 for over €400 million after a trial showed significantly improved survival. ¹

In 2008 he co-founded BioNTech in Mainz, again with Türeci and Huber, and remains its chief executive and a minority shareholder. In 2010 he co-founded TRON (Translational Oncology) in Mainz and was its scientific director until September 2019; his Mainz vaccine project won a GO-Bio sponsorship prize in 2006 and the German Cancer Prize in this field. In 2018 he co-founded HI-TRON and chairs its scientific management board. ^{1 2}

In January 2020 his teams pivoted to developing a vaccine against the new coronavirus; in November 2020 the vaccine BNT162b2, developed with Pfizer, was reported 95 percent effective. The English article describes it as the first mRNA drug approved for human use and the fastest vaccine ever developed against a new pathogen. BioNTech's own CV calls the effort "Project Lightspeed" and records its move from laboratory and clinical testing to conditional approval within an unprecedented eleven months. ^{1 2}

The English article reports that Şahin and Türeci will leave BioNTech and establish a new biotechnology company in 2026; the claim is carried here as the article's report, not independently verified by the museum. ¹

His research themes include tumour antigens; optimisation of mRNA through structural elements, nucleoside-modified chemistries and lipid delivery; personalised mutanome vaccines (Nature, 2017); nanoparticle delivery to dendritic cells; enhancement of CAR-T cell therapy (CARVAC); and antigen-specific tolerance in autoimmune disease, in mouse models of multiple sclerosis using 1-methylpseudouridine mRNA. The US National Library of Medicine lists 345 publications with his involvement, 49 as first author, and Nature Biotechnology named him among its Top 20 translational researchers in 2015, 2018 and 2019. ¹

This section reports positions carried by the sources; they are not the museum's verdict.

He is reported to have stressed international cooperation and equality of distribution — there was to be "no discussion" of exclusive national supply — and to oppose compulsory vaccination, emphasising voluntariness. ¹

Through their BioNTech shares, he and his wife entered Germany's 100 richest people; the Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated his net worth at US$7.22 billion in February 2022 — a figure given with its date because it moves continually with the share price. ¹

His awards include the Vincenz Czerny Prize (1995), an ASCO Merit Award (1995), the Georges Köhler Prize (2005), GO-Bio prizes (2006 and 2010), an ERC Advanced Grant (2017/18), the Mustafa Prize (2019), the German Cancer Award (2019), the Financial Times Person of the Year (2020), the Knight Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2021), the Princess of Asturias Award for Scientific Research (2021), the William B. Coley Award (2021), the German Future Prize (2021), the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize (2022), the Louis-Jeantet Prize (2022, with Türeci and Katalin Karikó), the Novo Nordisk Prize (2022) and the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize (2022). He was elected a member of EMBO in 2021, received the Pour le Mérite in 2023, and holds honorary citizenship of Mainz together with Türeci. ¹

Wikidata records his citizenship as German and Turkish. He is married to Özlem Türeci, the immunologist who co-founded his companies with him, and they have a daughter. ^{3 1}

• The defined sources cited above, registered in data/source/.
• Later translations and edits of this article need periodic review with clear update dates.