Biography|Ugur Sahin — The Goldgrube Building He Incorporated as BioNTech

On 2 June 2008 a German stock corporation named Petersberg 91, V AG was incorporated in Mainz.

On 11 December 2008 it took the name BioNTech AG.

The founders were Uğur Şahin, Özlem Türeci, and the Austrian oncologist Christoph Huber.

The name is a compression of Biopharmaceutical New Technologies.

The registered headquarters is An der Goldgrube 12, on the slope above the old town.

Seed money came from MIG Capital and the Strüngmann family office, among others.

The first business was not a pandemic vaccine.

It was individualized immunotherapy for cancer, using messenger RNA to tell a patient's cells to make the antigen the immune system should attack.

That platform is what Pfizer and BioNTech later pointed at SARS-CoV-2.

On 9 November 2020 the partners reported that BNT162b2 had shown more than 90 percent efficacy in a first interim analysis of the Phase 3 trial.

The analysis had been run the day before by an independent data-monitoring committee.

Şahin has been chief executive from the founding.

The company converted to an SE in 2019 and listed American depositary shares on Nasdaq that October.

The building on Goldgrube is a working campus, expanded since 2008, not a preserved founding shed.

What happened here is a lab problem given a factory floor.

The mRNA work that made the 2020 headline had been the company's reason for existing for twelve years.

A visitor will see security gates and new blocks, not a plaque from 2008.

The incorporation date is the fact that belongs on this pin.

Photo: BioNTech buildings on An der Goldgrube, Mainz, July 2020, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Armin Kübelbeck, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.