Company
ActiveBioNTech
Mainz · Since 2008
Still independent. The COVID-19 vaccine it developed with Pfizer was manufactured at a scale the company had never run before.
Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci founded BioNTech in Mainz in 2008 to build individualized cancer treatments using messenger RNA. The company was a research shop beside a university town, not a vaccine giant.
With Pfizer, it developed the first COVID-19 vaccine authorized in many countries. Pfizer had the plants and the distribution. BioNTech had the candidate. The work of 2020 was learning to be both, or to direct both, at a volume the founders had not built the company for.
A lab that had to scale
Mainz hired scientists, and it had to hire and partner for production: process developers, quality staff, the people who talk to a contract manufacturer in another country at three in the morning. A research company discovering that its product is needed by governments is a particular kind of growing up. The decisions are industrial. The staff, the month before, were running experiments.
Still in Mainz
BioNTech remains independent and has returned attention and money to cancer therapies, which was the original job. The vaccine work did not vanish. It left the company with plants, a larger staff, and a public name. The catalogue keeps it separate from Moderna because they were different firms that happened to share a molecule and a year.
The work it organized
- Research scientist
- Process developer
- Quality specialist
- Clinical coordinator
On the timeline
Related
- ModernaActive