BioNTech co-founders step down to launch new mRNA venture

The co-founders of BioNTech volition permission the institution to motorboat a caller mRNA-focused entity, amid mounting losses for the vaccine specialist.

Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci established BioNTech successful 2008 – the husband-and-wife squad presently service arsenic CEO and main aesculapian officer, respectively. In its afloat twelvemonth 2025 results, BioNTech said the co-founders volition measurement down by the extremity of 2026. A hunt is presently ongoing to place their successors.

The caller company, which Şahin and Türeci volition lead, volition ore connected mRNA technologies. The caller institution volition person chiseled resources, operations and funding, though BioNTech volition lend definite mRNA tech to assistance velocity improvement of caller candidates. Citi analysts said the announcement was “a astonishment that headlined earnings”.

The announcement came arsenic the German group’s Q4 2025 gross dropped to €907.4m ($1.05bn), down 25% from €1.2bn successful 2024. While full-year gross accrued owed to funds generated from a collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS), BioNTech’s nett losses roseate 57% to €1.1bn successful 2025, compared with €665.3m successful the erstwhile year.

Şahin and Türeci’s departures people the extremity of an epoch for BioNTech that saw the institution look arsenic 1 of the world’s starring biotechs. The company’s stock terms peaked during the Covid-19 pandemic aft it pioneered the archetypal ever approved mRNA jabs successful concern with Pfizer.

As request for Covid treatments and therapeutics has waned, truthful excessively has BioNTech’s stock price. The institution is trading much than 75% down from its highs successful mid-2021. Seeking a strategical pivot, BioNTech is targeting oncology to boost its bottommost line.

At the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference successful January 2026, Sahin said the ambition for BioNTech was to go a afloat integrated multiproduct oncology company. BioNTech presently has much than 25 Phase II and III programmes underway crossed oncology and 10 novel-combination trials. Modalities successful its crab pipeline see adjacent procreation immunomodulators, antibody cause conjugates (ADCs), and mRNA crab immunotherapies.

Adding much absorption to the firm shakeup, Citi analysts commented: “While we recognize jitters surrounding enactment changes, BioNTech has evolved to a constituent wherever the pipeline has aggregate signifier III opportunities up on with a modulation to commercialized stage.”

In June 2025, BMS outlaid up to $11bn to spouse with BioNTech successful the improvement and commercialisation of pumitamig, a crab cause successful late-stage trials that aims to instrumentality connected MSD’s megablockuster Keytruda (pembrolizumab). Citi analysts forecast that pumitamig could make much than €2bn by 2032. BioNTech besides acquired German rival CureVac past twelvemonth successful a $1.25bn deal, expanding its crab immunotherapy pipeline.