Ugur Sahin just reached a different milestone.
The co-founder of BioNTech SE on Thursday joined the world’s 500 richest men and women immediately after the U.K. this week authorized use of a Covid-19 vaccine that the German firm produced with Pfizer Inc.
BioNTech’s shares have jumped pretty much 8% this week and are up extra than 250% for the year. Sahin is now the 493rd-richest individual on the planet with a net worth of $5.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Sahin did not respond to a request for comment produced by means of BioNTech’s press workplace.
The U.K. was the initially western nation to approve a Covid-19 vaccine, clearing the way for the deployment of a shot that Pfizer and BioNTech have stated is 95% helpful in stopping illness. BioNTech is nonetheless waiting on a selection from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and European Union regulators.
The German firm previously focused on fighting cancer, but Sahin and his wife Ozlem Tureci — BioNTech’s chief healthcare officer — sharpened their concentrate on Covid-19 in January immediately after reading a troubling study about the spread of the virus in a family members that had visited Wuhan, China. Their outcomes are a validation of the new form of drug that they’ve spent their careers chasing.
“It could open the pharmaceutical field for a new class of molecules,” Sahin stated final month.
Turkish-born scientist Sahin is the sole shareholder of a German firm that controls an 18% stake in BioNTech, which raised $150 million from its U.S. initial public supplying final year, filings show.
Sahin joins Germany’s Struengmann brothers amongst the world’s 500 richest. They personal about half of BioNTech and backed the earlier biotech venture that Sahin set up with his wife, Ganymed Pharmaceuticals AG. The siblings’ fortune is estimated at extra than $24 billion combined.
The race to make a Covid-19 vaccine has also lifted a group of investors at BioNTech’s closest rival, Moderna Inc.
Shares of the Cambridge, Massachusetts-primarily based business have surged extra than 700% this year, generating billionaires of some early investors, such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Bob Langer and Harvard University professor Tim Springer, as properly as Chief Executive Officer Stephane Bancel, who is now worth $4.9 billion.
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