With the announcement by the American pharmaceutical company, Pfizer, and its partner, the German biotechnology company, BioNTech, that their experimental vaccine to prevent Covid-19 disease is more than 90% effective, the name of the director of Biontech Ugur Shaheen and his wife Ouzlem Turichy, the dream team Who are they?

Of humble origins as the son of a Turkish immigrant who works at the Ford plant in Cologne, Biontech CEO Ugur Shaheen, 55, has become among the 100 richest Germans, along with his wife and fellow board member Ouzlem Turiçi, 53, according to Reuters. Welt am Sonntag.

The Reuters report said that the market value of the Nasdaq-listed company Biontech, which the couple co-founded, has risen to $ 21 billion as of Friday's close from $ 4.6 billion a year ago, as the company prepares to play a major role in comprehensive immunization against the Coronavirus.

“Despite his accomplishments, he has never changed from being modest and incredibly elegant,” said Matthias Kromaire, a board member of the venture capital company MIG AG, whose funds have supported Biontech since its inception in 2008. ".

He added that Shaheen usually walks into business meetings, wearing jeans, and carrying his signature bike helmet and backpack.

Shaheen persistently pursued his childhood dream of studying medicine to become a doctor, and worked in teaching hospitals in Cologne and the southwestern city of Homburg, where he met Torrice during his early academic career, and medical research and oncology became a common passion for them.

Toriichi, the daughter of a Turkish doctor who immigrated to Germany, said in a media interview that even on their wedding day, they both made time to work in the laboratory.

In 2001 they found Ganymed Pharmaceuticals to develop antibodies to fight cancer;

But Shaheen - who at the time was a professor at Mainz University - never gave up academic research and education.

This project was sold to the Japanese company, Astellas, in 2016 for $ 1.4 billion.

By that time, the team behind Ganymede was already busy building Bionic, which was founded in 2008, to pursue a much broader set of cancer immunotherapy tools.

And the Biontech story took a turn when in January Shaheen came across a scientific paper on the outbreak of the new Corona virus in Wuhan, China.

Then, Biontech quickly recruited about 500 employees to work on several potential compounds, winning the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and the Chinese pharmaceutical company Fosun as partners in March.

Matthias Theobald, a professor of oncology at the University of Mainz, who has worked with Shaheen for 20 years, said that his tendency to downplay it contradicts an uncompromising ambition to transform medicine, reflected in the leap of faith to the Covid-19 vaccine.

"He is a very humble person. Appearances mean little to him. But he wants to create the structures that allow him to realize his visions, and this is where aspirations are far from humble," he added.