Meet the billionaire scientist couple who invented Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine

The science behind it, however, is the work of BioNTech. The brains behind the company is a husband-and-wife team of researchers: Ugur Sahin, 55, and Ozlem Tureci, 53, founders based in the German city of Mainz. Their extraordinary lab work, done in anonymity, goes back many years. The rapid progress of their candidate vaccine, BNT162, has now shot them to global recognition.