CEO Today Healthcare Awards

www.ceotodaymagazine.com CEO Today Healthcare Awards 2019 36 GERMANY FIRM PROFILE We aspire to individualize cancer medicine “Imagine you could tailor-make a cancer therapy for each individual patient, based on the genetic features of the tumor and provide it in a reproducible, timely and cost-effective way. We aim to change the treatment paradigm for cancer patients worldwide.” We are a next generation immunotherapy powerhouse pioneering individualized immunotherapies BioNTech was founded in 2008 on the understanding that every cancer patient’s tumor is unique and therefore each patient’s treatment should be individualized. To translate this idea into reality, we have combined ground-breaking research with cutting-edge technologies to develop pioneering therapeutics for cancer and beyond. As we prove the value of our approach in the clinic, we will continue to build the partnerships, manufacturing and team required to bring individualized treatments to patients worldwide. From our roots in Mainz, Germany, we are driven to become the leading global biotechnology company for individualized cancer medicine. How we enable our vision We are focused on bringing cancer immunotherapy into the next generation. We believe that we can accomplish this by applying the following principles: • Exploiting the full potential of the immune system. Our broad pipeline includes mRNA-based immune activators, antigen-targeting T cells and antibodies, and defined immunomodulators of various immune cell mechanisms. This portfolio is designed to mirror the evolution of the immune system to rely on multiple complementary pathways. • Broadening the universe of patients benefiting from cancer immunotherapy. We discover and exploit novel targets and target combinations. Our aim is to extend the utility of immunotherapy to patient populations that are not currently amenable or do not benefit from the targets of current immunotherapies. One example are patients with low mutational load tumors, such as pancreatic and prostate cancer, which we address with tumor-associated antigens. • Improving the success rate. We engineer and develop highly potent drug candidates designed to avoid compromising precision for the specific target. We further augment activity and counteract resistance mechanisms by combining compounds with non-overlapping, synergistic mechanisms of action, such as combining our FixVac immunotherapy with our novel CAR T therapies. • Focusing on curative approaches. The root cause of recurrence or lack of tumor eradication is interindividual variability and cancer heterogeneity. Addressing this biological reality is one of the mandatory design aspects of the product candidates we develop. For example, each of our cancer immunotherapies incorporates multiple targets in order to account for this variability. We have applied these four guiding principles to a broad suite of therapeutic platforms optimized for a distinct mode of action, high precision targeting, high potency and efficacy. We expect each platform to yield a pipeline of drug candidates for further development. We focus on the patient to provide unique treatments We believe that harnessing complementary, potentially synergistic modes of action increases the likelihood of therapeutic success, reduces the risk of emergence of secondary resistance mechanisms, and also unlocks a larger potential market. Critically, this approach allows us to pursue a technology agnostic approach, providing the most appropriate therapeutic platform or a combination thereof for the intended patient and purpose. UGUR SAHIN CEO of BioNTech ABOUT UGUR SAHIN Prof. Ugur Sahin, M.D. co- founded BioNTech in 2008 and has served as our Chief Executive Officer since that time. Prof. Sahin also served as the head of the Scientific Advisory Board of Ganymed Pharmaceuticals AG from 2008 until the company was acquired by Astellas Pharma Inc., or Astellas, in 2016. In 2010, Prof. Sahin co- founded TRON, and served as a Managing Director from 2010 until 2019. Prof. Sahin has also been a professor (W3) at the Mainz University Medical Center since 2014. Prof. Sahin co-founded the Ci3, the German Cluster Initiative of Individualized ImmunIntervention (Ci3), a non-profit organization. Prof. Sahin earned an M.D. in 1990 from the University of Cologne. Prof. Sahin is married to Dr. Özlem Türeci. www.biontech.de