Özlem Türeci

Özlem Türeci (born 6 March 1967 in Siegen, West Germany) is a Turkish-German physician, immunologist and entrepreneur, co-founder of BioNTech and its chief medical officer since 2018, who led the clinical development of the first mRNA vaccine approved for human use. ¹

She has been Professor of Personalized Immunotherapy at the Helmholtz Institute for Translational Oncology (HI-TRON) and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz since 2021, president of the Association for Cancer Immunotherapy (CIMT) since 2019, and has filed more than 500 patent applications and published more than 110 peer-reviewed articles. ^{1 2}

Türeci was born in Siegen, North Rhine-Westphalia, to Turkish immigrant parents; her mother was a biologist and her father a surgeon from Istanbul — the Turkish article gives his family roots in Fındıklı, Rize — who worked at the Catholic St. Elisabeth hospital in Lastrup in the district of Cloppenburg. ^{1 2}

The Arabic article differs from the other articles on her birthplace, giving Cloppenburg instead of Siegen — the district where her father worked; the museum records the discrepancy and follows Siegen, given by the English and Turkish articles and by Wikidata. ^{3 4}

As a child she was inspired by the nuns who worked helping people at her father's hospital, and the Arabic article reports that in her early years she wanted to become a nun before turning to medicine; in an interview she described herself as a "Prussian Turk". ^{1 3 2}

She attended, among other schools, the Städtisches Gymnasium in Bad Driburg and the Werner-von-Siemens-Gymnasium in Bad Harzburg, then studied medicine at Saarland University in Homburg, received her doctorate from the Medical Faculty of Saarland in 1992, was a Heisenberg fellow of the German Research Foundation, and completed her habilitation at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in 2002 in molecular medicine. ¹

Türeci's research focuses on identifying and characterising tumour-specific molecules and developing immunotherapies against cancer, infectious diseases and diseases of the immune and nervous systems, on a patient-specific basis. ¹

She worked at the University Medical Center Mainz, has been a private lecturer in cancer immunotherapy there since 2002, and with her husband and their mentor, the immunologist Christoph Huber, developed the concept of a "translational institute" realised in TRON, the translational oncology institute in Mainz; at the end of 2021 she accepted the professorship for Personalized Immunotherapy at the University Medicine of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the HI-TRON institute. ¹

She co-founded the German Cluster for Individualized Immune Intervention (Ci3) and has chaired it since 2011, has been president of the Association for Cancer Immunotherapy (CIMT) since 2019, and is a member of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the American Association for Cancer Research, and the German societies of immunology and of haematology and oncology. ¹

In 2001 Türeci co-founded Ganymed Pharmaceuticals with her husband Uğur Şahin; the company developed a new class of ideal monoclonal antibodies and the drug zolbetuximab for gastric and oesophageal cancer, and she was its chief scientific officer from 2001 to 2008 and chief executive officer from 2008 to 2016. ¹

Ganymed was sold to the Japanese company Astellas Pharma in 2016 and became its subsidiary; the articles differ on the value of the deal: the Turkish article gives €420 million and calls it the largest sale in the German medical sector to that date, while the English article gives $1.4 billion and the Arabic article €1.3 billion; the museum presents the figures attributed to their sources without settling between them. ^{1 2 3}

In 2008 she co-founded BioNTech in Mainz with Şahin and Huber, a company whose name derives from Biopharmaceutical New Technologies; she chaired its scientific advisory board from 2009 to 2018 and became chief medical officer in 2018, responsible for clinical research and development, and the company recruited Katalin Karikó, who had developed a way to avoid triggering an inflammatory reaction when injecting an mRNA drug. ¹

When Şahin read an article in The Lancet in January 2020 about the novel coronavirus, the couple decided to apply the mRNA vaccine technology they had researched for two decades to a vaccine against it, and persuaded Pfizer — with whom they had already begun work on an influenza vaccine — to help with development and distribution costs; by March 2020 they had five vaccine candidates ready to test in humans. ¹

Türeci was responsible for the clinical trials in the development of BNT162b2 (the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine, sold as Comirnaty); results in November 2020 indicated effectiveness above 90 percent, the vaccine was authorised the following month in Britain and the United States, and the first patient was injected at a hospital in Coventry; by February 2021 BioNTech planned to produce two billion doses by the end of that year. ¹

Türeci credits the rapid success of the project in part to international collaboration, including Pfizer and the Chinese firm Fosun Pharma, and to BioNTech's staff coming from sixty countries. ¹

The English article also reports that Şahin and Türeci will leave BioNTech and establish a new biotechnology company in 2026; the museum carries this as the article's report and has not verified it independently. ¹

With the journalist Joe Miller and her husband Uğur Şahin, Türeci co-authored Projekt Lightspeed (Project Lightspeed: The Road to the BioNTech Vaccine), published by Rowohlt in 2021, documenting the vaccine's development from laboratory to authorisation. ¹

With the proceeds of the vaccine's success BioNTech is pursuing its original goal of patient-specific mRNA cancer vaccines — more than 440 patients with 17 types of tumour have been treated with its approach — and is also working on an mRNA vaccine to prevent malaria and on producing vaccines in Africa. ¹

This section should be read as a presentation of positions reported by the sources, not as the museum's verdict on them.

Türeci described herself as a "Prussian Turk", a reference to her upbringing between Turkish and German cultures, raised in a multicultural environment around her father's Catholic hospital. ^{2 1}

In March 2021 she said BioNTech had several candidate cancer vaccines, with the expectation of offering them to patients within two years — an expectation the article records with its date. ¹

Through their BioNTech stakes the couple became billionaires; the Turkish article placed them eighth among Germany's ten richest people in August 2021 with a fortune of €14 billion, a figure given with its date because it moves with the share price; the family nonetheless continues to live modestly. ^{2 1}

Türeci has won joint awards with her husband Uğur Şahin, including the Financial Times Person of the Year (2020), the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2021), the Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research (2021), the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize (2022), honorary doctorates, and honorary citizenship of Mainz (2022). ¹

Forbes placed her 48th on its 2021 list of the World's 100 Most Powerful Women, and she has received the Aydın Doğan Award. ²

Türeci met Uğur Şahin in her final year of medical studies, when he was working at Saarland University Hospital in Homburg; they discovered a shared interest in using the immune system to fight cancer, married in 2002 and had a daughter four years later; the Arabic article reports that they returned to their laboratory on their wedding day itself after the ceremony. ^{1 3}

Türeci holds German and Turkish citizenship according to Wikidata. ⁴

• The defined sources cited above, registered in data/source/.
• Later translations and edits of this article require periodic review with clear update dates.