Biography|Ugur Sahin — The Saarland Hospital Where the Cancer Lab Became a Company

In 1992 Şahin followed Michael Pfreundschuh from Cologne to the University Hospital of the Saarland at Homburg.

He spent the rest of that decade as an assistant physician in internal medicine, on the hematology and oncology wards and in the attached labs.

The campus sits above the town on Kirrberger Straße, a mid-century hospital city with its own postcode.

It was here that he met Özlem Türeci, then finishing her medical studies.

They found they were working on the same question: whether the immune system could be taught to see a tumor.

They married in 2002.

In 1999 he completed his habilitation at Saarland in molecular medicine and immunology.

That qualification is the German license to teach the subject at university level.

A year later he took a research stay at the Institute for Experimental Immunology in Zurich.

Then the group moved to Mainz.

Homburg is the stretch where the clinician and the later company founder are still the same person on the same corridor.

The wards taught him what a grant cycle cannot.

Patients do not wait for the next review panel.

Ganymed, the first firm he and Türeci founded in 2001, was an attempt to shorten that wait.

BioNTech, seven years after that, was a second attempt with a different molecule.

Both attempts trace to this hill.

The buildings have been added to since the 1990s.

A visitor should not expect the exact 1992 façade.

The work that left with him did not stay in one doorway.

Photo: campus building at Uniklinik Homburg, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Armin Kübelbeck, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.