Özlem Türeci

Özlem Türeci (; born 6 March 1967) is a German physician, scientist and entrepreneur. In 2008, she co-founded the biotechnology company BioNTech, which in 2020 developed the first messenger RNA-based vaccine approved for use against COVID-19. Since 2021, she has been Professor of Personalized Immunotherapy at the Helmholtz Institute for Translational Oncology (HI-TRON) and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Türeci and her spouse, Uğur Şahin, have won a number of awards.

Personal life and education Born in Siegen, West Germany in 1967, Türeci is the daughter of Turkish immigrants. Her mother was a biologist. Her father, a surgeon, was from Istanbul and worked at the Catholic hospital St. Elisabeth-Stift in Lastrup in the district of Cloppenburg. She attended, among others, the Städtisches Gymnasium in Bad Driburg and the Werner-von-Siemens-Gymnasium in Bad Harzburg. As a child, she was strongly inspired by the nuns who worked to help people at the hospital her father worked at. She was a Heisenberg fellow of the German Research Foundation. Her research focused on the identification and characterization of tumor-specific molecules and the development of immunotherapies against cancer. In 2002, she completed her habilitation qualification at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz in the field of molecular medicine.

While completing her final year of studies, Türeci met her future husband, Uğur Şahin, who was working at Saarland University Hospital in Homburg. They discovered that they shared an interest in using the body's immune system to fight cancer. The couple married in 2002 and had a daughter four years later. Although Türeci and her husband became billionaires as a result of their business interests, the family continues to live modestly. Since 2002, she has been a private lecturer there in the field of cancer immunotherapy. Together with her husband and their mentor, the immunologist Christoph Huber, she developed the concept of a "translational institute", which was realized in 2001 with the foundation of TRON, short for "translational oncology." Two companies later founded by Türeci and her husband are spin-offs of work done at the university in Mainz. Türeci accepted the appointment to the professorship for "Personalized Immunotherapy" at the University Medicine of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the Helmholtz Institute "HI-TRON Mainz" founded in 2019 at the end of 2021.

Ganymed Pharmaceuticals In 2001, Türeci and her future husband founded the company Ganymed Pharmaceuticals. This company focused on a new class of cancer drugs called ideal monoclonal antibodies She was chief scientific officer from 2001 to 2008 and led the company from 2008 to 2016 in the role of chief executive officer. In 2016, the company was sold to Astellas Pharma for $1.4 billion and is now a subsidiary of that company.

BioNTech

In 2008, Türeci, her husband, and Christoph Huber founded the Mainz-based biotechnology company BioNTech, Türeci has been Chief Medical Officer (CMO) of the company since 2018. As CMO, she is primarily responsible for Clinical Research and Development. Along with researchers from TRON, they hired Katalin Karikó, who had developed a way to avoid triggering an inflammatory reaction when injecting an mRNA drug. Concerned that a pandemic could be coming, the couple decided to apply the mRNA vaccine technology they had been researching for two decades to developing a vaccine against the disease, As of February 2021, BioNTech was planning to produce 2 billion doses of their vaccine by the end of 2021.

Türeci was responsible for the clinical trials in the development of the vaccine called BNT162b2 (the Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, sold under the brand name Comirnaty). Türeci credits the rapid success of the project in part to international collaboration, including Pfizer and the Chinese firm Fosun Pharma.

Uğur Şahin and Türeci will leave BioNTech and establish a new biotechnology company in 2026.

Other Türeci has filed more than 500 international patent applications and published more than 110 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Business associations German Top Research Cluster for Individualized Immune Intervention (Ci3) of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research: co-founder and chair since 2011 Association for Cancer Immunotherapy (CIMT), the largest European association for cancer immunotherapy: president since 2019. Member of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), the , and the .

Publications (selection)

Recognition Türeci and her husband were named Financial Times People of the Year for 2020 based on their ability to produce a safe and effective vaccine for COVID-19 less than a year after the genetic sequence of the virus was released, an achievement cited as "one of the greatest medical breakthroughs of our time."

Türeci has been an honorary citizen of the state capital Mainz since March 2022.

Nominated by the Rhineland-Palatinate parliamentary group of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Türeci was a voting member of the 17th Federal Assembly for the 2022 German presidential election.

On 29 March 2023, Türeci was among the guests invited to the state dinner hosted by President Frank-Walter Steinmeier in honor of King Charles III at Bellevue Palace.

Honorary degrees 2021: Honorary Doctorate from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Cologne (with Uğur Şahin) 2022: Honorary doctorate from Philipps-Universität Marburg (with Uğur Şahin) 2022: Honorary doctorate from University of Amsterdam (with Uğur Şahin) 2022: Honorary doctorate from University of Antwerp (with Uğur Şahin)

Awards

1995: Vincenz Czerny Prize of the 1997: Calogero Paglierello Research Award 2005: of the 2020: The National German Sustainability Award 2020: Financial Times Person of the Year (with Uğur Şahin) 2021: Axel Springer Award (with Uğur Şahin) 2021: Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany 2021: Karl Heinz Beckurts Prize 2021: Princess of Asturias Award in the category Technical and Scientific Research (with Uğur Şahin and five others). 2021: Aydın Doğan Award (with Uğur Şahin) 2021: William b. Coley Award 2021: German Future Prize 2021: Empress Theophano Prize 2022: Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize 2022: Warren Alpert Foundation Prize 2022: Werner-von-Siemens-Ring (with Uğur Şahin and three others) 2022: Louis Jeantet Prize 2022: The Novo Nordisk Prize (with Uğur Şahin and two others) 2022: Order of Merit of Rhineland-Palatinate (with Uğur Şahin) 2022: Honorary citizenship of Mainz (with Uğur Şahin and Christoph Huber)