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Sometimes even an old mountain bike can help describe a person.
The rather rickety, blue vehicle is the company vehicle of what is probably the most famous German company founder of these days.
Ugur Sahin, CEO of Biontech, regularly drives it from the family home to the nearby company headquarters in Mainz.
In the meantime, the 55-year-old would have had a fleet of company vehicles, including a chauffeur.
But, according to close companions, Sahin can confidently do without such status symbols.
Not to consciously set an example - but because it simply means nothing to him.
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Sahin, born in Iskenderun, Turkey, is all sorts of things: a family man, husband, scientist, molecular biology, doctor, founder, manager, integration role model, university professor, billionaire and meanwhile one of the most famous people in the world.
A German Elon Musk, however, who seeks the public to market his ideas, he is not, although the comparison is obvious in view of the meteoric rise.
Often it seems more as if Sahin is the sudden fame that the successful development of the world's first vaccine against corona brought with it rather unpleasant: A side effect of the scientific success that is helping to free the world from the pandemic.
Certainly not the goal.
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Sahin and his wife Özlem Türeci are in agreement on this.
Like him, she started as a cancer doctor and, as head of research at Biontech, together with him last year brought the Comirnaty vaccine into the world and thus gave mankind the first vaccine against corona.
Since then, the world has been celebrating the humble founding couple from Mainz.
On Thursday they will receive the Axel Springer Award for their services.
The Federal Cross of Merit will follow at the end of the week, and they will even be awarded the Nobel Prize, although this award is very rarely given for medical applications and is therefore unlikely, despite the worldwide applause.
Either way - Sahin and Türeci will show at honors like this that they would certainly not have entered the global race for a vaccine with their company if they had not been sure that they could make a significant contribution.
"See the crisis as an opportunity"
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And they will use the opportunity to advertise Germany as a research location, which has so far often been neglected in the perception of politics and the public and is now suddenly in the spotlight thanks to Biontech.
“Seeing the crisis as an opportunity” is what they both like to call it.
Sahin doesn't have to leaf through a calendar or notebook to remember the sequence of dramatic decisions made over the past year.
His growing restlessness when he read the first article in the medical journal "The Lancet" about several cases of an unknown lung disease in China.
The first discussions with his wife, with the team, with the investors about the pandemic that was sweeping the world.
"At Easter", Sahin was sure at the beginning of February, "the schools in Germany are closed."
While the World Health Organization was still deliberating, the company boss and his team were already making preparations for the Lightspeed project.
A vaccine had to be found, as quickly as possible, as if developed at the speed of light.
How big the risk was becomes clear when you take a closer look at the company.
Biontech was founded back in 2008, the company headquarters is at the almost clairvoyant-looking address “An der Goldgrube” in Mainz - at Biontech you can no longer hear the allusions to it.
The location is convenient, within walking distance of the university, where Sahin and Türeci worked as oncologists for a long time.
However, at the time at the beginning of 2020 there was not yet a product that was ready for the market.
Biontech has almost 30 projects in the pipeline, cancer therapies in particular, but one or the other vaccine against influenza and HIV is also included.
Companies like Biontech regularly need fresh capital in order to advance the ambitious projects and carry out large clinical studies.
But that's hard to come by in Germany.
One diagram was enough to convince the investor
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It turned out to be a stroke of luck that the venture capital investor Michael Motschmann and his MIG funds became aware of the research couple at an early stage. At that time, Türeci and Sahin were just getting started with their first company, Ganymed.
A single graph should have been enough to convince the investor of the quality of the two and their approaches: a curve with the survival rates of breast cancer patients with and without treatment.
Even with those who have been treated in the conventional way, there is still a gap; not everyone can be cured by a long way.
To penetrate this gap and thus add new weapons to the arsenal against cancer - that was and is the real goal of the Biontech couple.
That is why, as Türeci emphasized very emphatically in a public interview with Chancellor Merkel last year, they want to take care of themselves again as soon as the pandemic is tamed.
Matthias Kromayer, one of their early discoverers and now a member of the board at MIG, describes the two as thoroughly “technology-agnostic”: “Both think from the end.
Many scientists fall in love with their subject.
Ugur and Özlem are only concerned with the results.
About how to turn a good idea into an ideal one. "
For some from the biotech scene, Sahin is even one of the best mRNA experts in the world.
He compares himself more to an immune engineer - always on the lookout for new building blocks in order to achieve the best possible result for the patient.
Türeci, who appears even less in public than her husband because of their daughter, is by no means overshadowed.
The couple generally publishes scientific articles together, and the two are considered congenial partners.
“From the outside it is impossible to say who has which idea.
They inspire each other, ”says Kromayer, describing the couple's way of working.
But even Sahin and Türeci first had to learn to be a manager, as they themselves admit.
Above all, the difficult focus on only a few projects, because even long-suffering investors like the brothers Thomas and Andreas Strüngmann do not have endlessly deep pockets.
In order to venture into new dimensions, the company dared to go public in 2019.
In the USA, not in Germany, mind you, and initially only met with cautious interest.
The mRNA technology, which Biontech relies on, among other things, appeared to many to be too complicated, and the chances of the cancer projects difficult to assess.
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Today the small company from Mainz is one of the stars of the scene.
The stock market value has risen from 3.8 billion to over 24 billion dollars during this time.
The stock market success has given Sahin, who holds around 17 percent of the shares, a place among the 500 super-rich in the world.
Late in the evening, they are still on the phone with the Pfizer team
But he doesn't care much about it himself.
“We are not guided by stock market prices, but by what we can influence with our work.
I'm not concerned with the daily stock market price, but with the data from our studies, ”he said in an interview with WELT last year.
During the long months of the lockdown, Sahin and Türeci always had this data and everything related to it in view, from early morning when negotiations with their partner Fosun in China were pending until late in the evening when it came to agreements with the team from Partner Pfizer in the US went.
Unlike the biotech competitors Moderna and Curevac, Biontech got major partners on board early on to develop its own corona vaccine.
A smart move, because the necessary mass studies with tens of thousands of test subjects and the global marketing of the vaccine would not have been manageable for a company with just 1300 employees.
Since Comirnaty was approved, a whole new side of their work has been added to Sahin and Türeci: Suddenly everything also has a political dimension.
The nationwide pride in the world's first vaccine from Germany was soon followed by a heated political debate about the EU's too hesitant ordering policy.
Germany, of all places, where the precious vaccine was developed, suddenly lost out to other countries that had accessed Biontech more quickly.
Sahin and Türeci have always stayed out of this debate.
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Only once did Sahin express a little astonishment in an interview with “Spiegel” that the EU did not order more early.
The price of the vaccine has also recently become a political issue.
AstraZeneca debate creates a yawning emptiness in the vaccination centers
Vaccination appointments had to be canceled across Europe due to the AstraZeneca stop.
There is a yawning emptiness in many vaccination centers.
Exceptions are Belgium and Austria, where the vaccine continues to be used.
Source: WORLD / Nadine Jantz
When it was ripped off from political circles that the company should have asked for more than 54 euros per vaccine dose, Biontech suddenly found itself there as a usury company.
In the process, Sahin countered shortly afterwards, the industrialized countries were only given an early price of 15 to 30 euros per dose and only then calculated a specific price model.
Precisely because of such experiences, the small company continues to stay out of big politics - and refrain from criticism of any kind.
The people of Mainz have their hands full anyway to further ramp up the production of the vaccine.
Especially since the vaccination campaigns with the vaccine from the British-Swedish manufacturer AstraZeneca were stopped in several countries due to serious side effects.
Sahin and Türeci do not comment on this either.
But the two made their basic position on the supposed competition for the vaccines against Corona clear very early on: It is not about a race between companies.
It's all about the people's against the virus.
"Everything on shares" is the daily stock market shot from the WELT business editorial team. Every morning from 7 a.m. with WELT financial journalists. For stock market experts and beginners.
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