Prof. Ugur Sahin, M.D.
Co-founder 2008Background
Ugur Sahin was born in Turkey and moved to Germany at age four, growing up in Cologne. He studied medicine at the University of Cologne, completing a doctoral thesis in cancer immunotherapy. He remained in academia as an oncohematology physician and researcher at university hospitals in Saarland and Zurich before establishing a research group at the University of Mainz in 2000 and becoming a professor of experimental oncology in 2006. In 2001, he co-founded Ganymed Pharmaceuticals with Ozlem Tureci and Christoph Huber, developing the monoclonal antibody zolbetuximab for gastrointestinal cancer. Ganymed was sold to Astellas Pharma in 2016 for over $436 million after demonstrating significant survival benefit in gastric cancer. Sahin's defining founding philosophy was the conviction that cancer treatment must be individualized because each patient's tumor is genetically unique, an insight developed through years of clinical practice watching standardized therapies fail.
Role at BioNTech SE
Ugur Sahin co-founded BioNTech in 2008 and has been its chief executive since. Born in Iskenderun, Turkey, he moved to Germany as a child, grew up in Cologne and studied medicine at the University of Cologne. He trained as a hematologist-oncologist, met Özlem Türeci at Saarland University Hospital in Homburg, and became a professor of experimental oncology at the University of Mainz. With Türeci and Christoph Huber he first founded Ganymed Pharmaceuticals in 2001, whose antibody zolbetuximab was later developed by Astellas after it bought Ganymed in 2016. At BioNTech he pushed mRNA as a way to build cancer treatments matched to each patient's tumor. In January 2020 he launched Project Lightspeed, which produced the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine within the year. In March 2026 BioNTech announced that he and Türeci would leave by the end of 2026 to lead a new, separate mRNA company; Guido Oelkers succeeds him as CEO by February 1, 2027. Prof. Ugur Sahin, M.D. was born in 1965.