German biotechnology BioNTech said on the 10th (local time) that its co-founders plan to leave the company and separately establish a new firm to develop mRNA (messenger ribonucleic acid) drugs. BioNTech developed an mRNA vaccine during the COVID-19 pandemic and commercialized it with U.S. company Pfizer.
According to BioNTech, Chief Executive Officer Ugur Sahin, 61, and Chief Medical Officer Özlem Türeci, 59, will move to the new company by the end of the year to focus on research and development (R&D) of next-generation mRNA medicines. The couple co-founded BioNTech in 2008.
In a statement released the same day, CEO Sahin said, "Over the past 18 years, we have grown BioNTech from a startup into a global biopharmaceutical corporations with a strong and diverse pipeline (drug candidates)," adding, "Türeci and I are ready to be pioneers once again."
BioNTech said it will grant the new company founded by the two certain rights to its mRNA technology and take an equity stake. Simply put, BioNTech will be partitioning its R&D and business functions. The company said a split structure in which the new firm is dedicated to drug development and BioNTech focuses on commercialization will help increase shareholder value.
Sahin and Türeci come from families of Türkiye immigrants. Both of their parents moved to Germany in the late 1960s. Sahin was born in southern Türkiye and moved to Cologne, a city in western Germany, at age 4. Türeci was born and raised in the northern German state of Lower Saxony. Both graduated from medical school. After developing a COVID vaccine, the two vaulted from so-called "dirt spoon" backgrounds as children of immigrant workers to become billionaires. By the end of 2020, their net worth topped 5 trillion won, making them the 493rd richest people on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The two proposed vaccine development to U.S. company Pfizer in Jan. 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began, after reading a paper about infections in a family that had returned from Wuhan, China. The mRNA COVID vaccine contains mRNA, the information that makes the coronavirus' spike protein. Once inside the body, it produces the virus' spikes, triggering an immune response that induces antibodies.
mRNA Vaccine are considered able to respond to epidemics more quickly than conventional vaccines. Viruses constantly mutate. People get new flu shots every year to fight newly circulating viruses. Traditional vaccines take months because the virus is cultured in cells or eggs. By contrast, mRNA can be produced quickly through chemical synthesis. That allows faster responses to mutations.
However, in the United States, the world's No. 1 pharmaceutical market, mRNA Vaccine are losing ground recently. Even so, the BioNTech founders' plan to set up a new mRNA drug developer is seen as a judgment that, despite recent declines in vaccine sales, mRNA's competitiveness as a drug technology remains strong. The Trump administration in the U.S., led by Health and Human Services Minister Robert Kennedy Jr., a vaccine critic, cut funding for mRNA research related to infectious diseases, but left out development of other types of mRNA-based medicines, including cancer treatments, from the targets.
When they founded BioNTech, Sahin and Türeci had originally planned to develop anticancer drugs using mRNA. The approach involves injecting into the body mRNA that carries the genetic information of proteins on the surface of cancer cells, prompting immune cells to identify and attack the cancer cells. This could enable prevention, like the COVID-19 vaccine, while delivering treatment.
An mRNA immune anticancer vaccine can also deliver a patient's unique genes, enabling personalized therapy. BioNTech is developing an mRNA Vaccine for melanoma, a type of skin cancer, and Germany's CureVac is targeting lung cancer. BioNTech acquired CureVac last year.