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

In 2001, the couple founded Ganymed Pharmaceuticals, which developed drugs to treat cancer using monoclonal antibodies. In 2008, they founded BioNTech, with the aim of using a wider range of technologies, including messenger RNA, to treat cancer. “We want to build a large European pharmaceutical company,” Dr. Sahin said in an interview with the Wiesbaden Courier, a local paper. They sold Ganymed for $1.4 billion in 2016.

Even before the pandemic, BioNTech was abuzz with research activity, and raised hundreds of millions of dollars. It currently has more than 1,800 staff, with offices in Berlin, other German cities and Cambridge, Massachusetts.