30 therapies researched
Biontech aims to have its cancer drug approved by 2026
February 4, 2024, 12:45 p.m
The Mainz-based company Biontech achieved great honor in the corona pandemic by developing an effective vaccine. Scientists are currently increasingly researching drugs against cancer. We are well on the way to “controlling cancer in the long term”.
Biontech boss Ugur Sahin sees medicine on the right path to “controlling or ideally curing cancer in the long term”. “In principle, I see no reason why many types of cancer should not be detectable earlier and easier to cure,” Sahin told the news magazine “Spiegel”.
The background is a development that Sahin calls “the great knowledge revolution” – an ever faster spiral of progress and development leaps, driven by digital technologies and artificial intelligence. “Everything happens much, much faster today than it used to,” said the researcher and company boss. “To gain insights, to confirm them, to apply them.”
Sahin has been researching cancer for decades and is a professor of experimental oncology at the Mainz University Medical Center. The company he founded, Biontech, is currently researching almost 30 new cancer therapies and relies in particular on artificial intelligence. From 2026, Sahin hopes that the first medications will be ready for approval. “We want to have a large portfolio of cancer therapies on the market by 2030,” said the Biontech boss on the occasion of World Cancer Day.
During the corona pandemic, Biontech quickly developed a vaccine based on an mRNA active ingredient, which was vaccinated millions of times in Germany. The company made huge profits and wants to further expand vaccine production – including on the African continent. In December 2023, a production facility was inaugurated in Rwanda’s capital Kigali. Test production is scheduled to start there in 2025. If development and approval are successful, vaccines against tuberculosis, malaria, HIV and Mpox could one day be produced there.