Professor Dr Uğur Şahin

Research interests: Molecular medicine, immunology, immunotherapy
Uğur Şahin is a physician and academic researcher in the field of immunology. His research interests lie in cancer research, immunology and immunotherapy, and he is a pioneer in the fields of mRNA vaccines and individualised cancer immunotherapy.
Together with his wife and fellow physician Özlem Türeci and Austrian haematologist, oncologist and immunologist Christoph Huber, he founded the BioNTech company in Mainz/Germany. He and the BioNTech team went on to develop the first COVID-19 vaccine to be approved for use worldwide. Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci have since received numerous prizes and awards around the world in recognition of their vital contribution to the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.
The main focus of Uğur Şahin's research is on the development of immunotherapy treatments for cancer, infectious diseases, diseases of the immune and nervous systems, and other rare diseases. To achieve this, Uğur Şahin and his team characterise new target molecules and develop vaccine candidates based on messenger ribonucleic acids (mRNA) which deliver genetic information. Their focus is on optimising the mRNA platform, in order to trigger an appropriate immune response, causing cancer tumours to shrink or neutralising pathogens in the case of infection.
Over the last 20 years, Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci have solved several of the challenges associated with mRNA vaccines. They have developed methods for delivering mRNA to dendritic cells using a suitable lipid carrier; improved the stability of the mRNA; and increased the level of protein transfer by 1000 times.
Uğur Şahin's contributions to more than 500 patents and innovative research approaches in the life sciences sector have provided a firm foundation for his research and the work of BioNTech SE. In their efforts to develop optimised RNA, he and the rest of the BioNTech team have achieved some remarkable successes, not least their COVID-19 vaccine, which has been deployed around the world and widely helped stem infections from SARS-CoV-2 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the field of oncology, Uğur Şahin's work focuses on individualised mRNA based immunotherapy, cell therapies and antibodies against various tumours.