Power Couple Who Made Immigrants Proud

Ozlem Tureci and Ugur Sahin

Ugur Sahin was born in Iskenderun, Turkey, on 29 September 1965.

Immigrated to Germany with his family at the age of four. His father was a worker for Ford Motor Company in Cologne.

Ozlem Tureci was born in Lower Saxony — a German state situated in northwestern Germany — in 1967. His father was a Turkish immigrant and physician who immigrated from Istanbul, Turkey.

Son of A Gastarbeiter

Ugur was interested in popular science books from an early age — which he borrowed from the Catholic church library.

He graduated from the Erich-Kästner Gymnasium — the most advanced type of German secondary school — in Cologne in 1984. He was the first Turkish guestworker’s child at the school. He took advanced courses in math and chemistry.

Ugur wanted to become a medical doctor and studied medicine at the University of Cologne from 1984 to 1992. He received his doctorate in 1992 with a thesis on immunotherapy for tumor cells.

Ugur worked as a physician from 1992 to 2000 at the University Hospital of Cologne. And then he moved to Saarland University Hospital where he met Ozlem Tureci.

Ozlem earned her M.D. at Saarland University’s Faculty of Medicine. She was an expert on cancer immunotherapy.

First Endeavour

Sahin and Tureci first became friends. And then they became business partners and co-founded Ganymed Pharmaceuticals in 2001. Finally, they decided to become life partners as well and married in 2002.

On the day of their wedding, after the ceremony couple returned to Ganymed lab and went back to work.

Ozlem was the Chief Scientific Officer of Ganymed Pharmaceuticals at the beginning and became CEO of the company in 2008.

Ganymed developed the monoclonal antibody, which is to be used against cancer cells without harming any healthy cells.

In 2016 Japanese pharmaceutical company, Astellas Pharma acquired Ganymed Pharmaceutical for $1.4 billion. Back then, this was the largest biotech deal to date in Germany.

Foundation of BioNTech

The husband-and-wife additionally co-founded another biotech startup BioNTech in 2008.

Ozlem was Chief Medical Officer and Ugur was Chief Executive Officer of this new startup.

BioNTech mostly focused on cancer treatments. Nevertheless, in 2018 Ugur Sahin attended an infectious disease conference in Berlin and made bold predictions about his company’s ability to rapidly develop a vaccine in the event of a global pandemic with messenger RNA technology.

There wasn’t any global pandemic at that time and his words were too good to be true or at least naive, especially for a relatively small biotech startup founder.

However, last month, BioNTech and Pfizer announced that they developed a vaccine for COVID-19 which is 90% effective in preventing the novel coronavirus.

Ozlem Tureci and Ugur Sahin — just like he promised in Berlin 2 years ago — managed to develop a vaccine in less than 8 months for a virus that became a global pandemic in a month and killed more than 1.5 million people worldwide.

But how did they achieve something, which seems impossible for most of the experts?

The Lancet Article

Early January 2020, Ugur Sahin read an article in medical journey The Lancet about novel coronavirus — at the time rapidly spreading in China.

After the piece, he believed that this was the virus he mentioned 2 years ago which can evolve into a full-blown pandemic swiftly.

He started to work on it immediately. They called the project: Lightspeed.

BioNTech canceled all vacations for its employees.

Since 2018, BioNTech was working with Pfizer on the flu vaccine. In this process, Ugur Sahin became friends with Pfizer CEO, Albert Bourla who is also an immigrant from Greece.

This friendship and immigrant backgrounds of both scientists allowed them to work on coronavirus vaccine collectively faster than any other pharmaceutical company in the world.

“I’m from Turkey and he’s from Greece. As an immigrants, this was very personal for us from the very beginning.” — Ugur Sahin

30 Billion Dollar Company

Even before the pandemic, BioNTech was known as a very successful biotech startup.

They raised millions of dollars in different funding rounds from the world’s biggest venture capital firms.

They have more than 1,800 employees and two headquarters — one in Germany and the other one in the US.

In 2019, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donated $55 million to BioNTech for its work treating H.I.V. and tuberculosis in Africa.

Last year, BioNTech sold 10 million shares to the public in a successful IPO (Initial Public Offering) valuing the company $3.3 billion.

Since then BioNTech's share price soared from $15 to $130 and currently valuing the company around $30 billion.

This event put Tureci-Sahin couple on the 50 richest people list in Turkey, the 100 richest people list in Germany and the 500 richest people list in the world. Yet, they are still living in a moderate apartment in Mainz with their teenage daughter, close to BioNTech headquarters. And they are riding bicycles to work and don’t have a car personally.

What All of These Means for Immigrants Around The World?

The success of the power couple who are both Turkish immigrants in Germany was a reason for celebration and pride for every immigrant in the world.

After the 2016 election results in the US and the recent uptrend movement in Europe for the far-right parties — immigrants are having tough years lately.

Some had to leave their countries because of the war and some had to separate from their children because of one lunatic.

But every time it was worse than before. They were feeling left out and ignored by society.

That’s why the success of Ozlem Tureci and Ugur Sahin was a relief for most of them. Because it showed the world again, immigrants are not only coming to take what’s yours, but they are coming to give you something that you don’t even know exist.

Make Immigrants Proud Again

No one has ever left the lands of his ancestors, his family, and his friends willingly or just for fun. I can tell you this from my personal experience as a Turkish immigrant in the Netherlands for more than two years. Even the ones who are called “expats” are struggling a lot. You can’t even imagine what others are going through.

If you look at the biggest, most successful American companies in history, you will see most of them founded by immigrants or second-generation Americans whose parents were immigrants.

It is not the “patriots” who Make America Great Again with their long beards, Ford pickups, and semi-automatic rifles from Walmart, but the so-called “traitors” — immigrants — are the ones who serve for MAGA with the jobs that they’ve created and with the companies they’ve built from scratch.

When Will Atlas Shrug?

So why are the immigrants still trying to carry these nations on their backs like Atlas, despite all the cruelty they are facing every day?

Because immigrants know that the world is a cruel place.

Because immigrants know that they have to work harder than anyone to get “simple” things in life.

And most importantly immigrants don’t know how to give up — because giving up is equal to death for them almost every time.

Whose Child Gonna Fix The Next Pandemic?

From 100 years from now, maybe another global pandemic will threaten the lives of our grandchildren and maybe one of the children of a Syrian refugee baby from today would solve the problem and save the world again just like Ozlem and Ugur did in 2020.

But we will never know this because that Syrian refugee baby died in the Aegean Sea. And we didn’t do anything to save her. Because we were too busy with the imaginary borders that we draw with a ruler on war tables a hundred years ago.

Now she became an angel and watching us from the clouds — to see how many babies we will let die for this nonsense…