Innovation and Speed

Part of BioNTech’s DNA

Innovation and speed have been part of BioNTech’s DNA ever since its formation 16 years ago. Back in 2020, it took the German biotech company less than a year to develop a vaccine against Covid-19. flow’s Desirée Buchholz talked to Dirk Schreiber, BioNTech’s Head of Treasury, on why real-time treasury is key for him – and how APIs help to achieve this goal

When BioNTech was founded in 2008 by Ugur Sahin, Özlem Türeci and Christoph Huber in the German city of Mainz, the three immunologists and oncologists aimed for nothing less than revolutionising the way cancer is treated. “As every cancer type is unique, we believe that immunology and immunotherapy should be able to address each cancer indication in a different way,” states the company’s website.^[1]

By January 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world, CEO Sahin and his team had already spent more than a decade on the research and development of immunology-based therapies for cancer. BioNTech quickly decided to leverage the work its team had done around messenger RNA (mRNA) to develop a vaccine against Covid-19. This technology instructs cells to produce proteins, resulting in an immune response which helps protect against diseases.

Before the year-end in December 2020, BioNTech and its partner Pfizer – which had joined forces eight months earlier to accelerate the development, distribution and commercialisation of a potential Covid-19 vaccine – received the world’s first authorisation for an mRNA-based vaccine against the previously unknown viral infection without cutting corners.^[2] This not only helped to contain the pandemic in certain regions – just as vaccines by Moderna, AstraZeneca and others did – it also marked a scientific turning point by showing the potential of mRNA for vaccine development. While research around this technology dates to the 1970s, it had never been used in an approved treatment before.^[3]

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