Biography|Ugur Sahin — The Mainz Medical Center Where He Built the Oncology Group

After a 2000 stay at Zurich's Institute for Experimental Immunology, Şahin joined the University Medical Center of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.

The campus address is Langenbeckstraße 1.

From 2001 he held leading posts in cancer research and immunology there.

In 2006 he became professor of experimental oncology at the Third Medical Clinic.

The university hospital is also where the first company was planned.

In 2001, while keeping the academic post, Şahin and Özlem Türeci co-founded Ganymed Pharmaceuticals in Mainz.

The point was to push antibody work toward patients faster than a grant cycle allowed.

Astellas later bought Ganymed, after a gastric-cancer antibody had data in hand.

The Mainz campus is not a backdrop.

It is the bench the companies were spun out of.

In 2010 he founded TRON, a translational oncology institute tied to this hospital, to keep the academic pipeline open beside the firms.

He has kept a teaching tie to the university even after BioNTech's public listing.

A visitor coming for the vaccine story will find a working hospital, not a museum of 2020.

The buildings on Langenbeckstraße have been added to and renamed.

The pin marks the medical city, not a single preserved office.

What happened here between 2000 and 2008 is the conversion of a habilitation into a lab that could hire, patent, and spin out.

Without that conversion there is no Goldgrube company down the hill.

Photo: Universitätsmedizin Mainz campus building, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Armin Kübelbeck, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.