It couldn't have gone much better. Right now, when the now world-famous vaccine manufacturer BioNTech SE wants to grow, yes must, the Bundeswehr in Mainz is voluntarily withdrawing. The barracks in the upper town, which will soon be vacated, offers enough space for a future project called “BioNTech-Campus” and also leaves enough space for the plans for an attractive residential area close to the city that have long been cherished by the municipality. The fact that the new city quarter has to turn out a bit smaller than originally thought is easy to get over. Because the chance to bind an extremely expansion-friendly and currently extremely successful company to the city in the long term is unlikely to come back anytime soon.
As usual, the representatives of the biotechnology company, which has been trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on the American stock exchange since 2019, announced on Tuesday that their campus project around the headquarters "An der Goldgrube" would provide up to 2000 additional positions in research and administration over the next few years wanting to worry.
There was no mention of investment costs.
Biotechnology "made in Mainz"
The company, which has been in existence for ten years and which in pre-Corona times mainly dealt with the development of immunotherapies for cancer patients, is already showing itself to be extremely inventive when it comes to making room in the city for its many researchers and scientists Find. The branch offices born out of necessity, for example on Hechtsheimer Strasse and in the Hechtsheim industrial park, could one day be integrated into the planned science campus once it is completed.
The city and many of its citizens are already a little proud of the fact that future-oriented biotechnology “made in Mainz” is being talked about around the world, said Town Hall chief Michael Ebling (SPD) on Tuesday when the expansion and conversion plans were presented on the site. The whole thing goes very well with a university location with equally very successful university medicine. And because the newly formed state government of Rhineland-Palatinate has now made the subject of "biomedicine" a central concern, the people in Mainz hope that the almost magical success story of the researcher couple Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci will continue for a long time.