Former Covid winner: Biontech is closing three German locations

dpa The months-long search for buyers was unsuccessful: the three German Biontech locations in Idar-Oberstein in Rhineland-Palatinate, in Marburg in Hesse and in Tübingen in Baden-Württemberg will close. According to the company, around 1,800 employees are affected. According to the company, it will end in Tübingen at the end of 2027, in Marburg at the beginning of 2028 and in Idar-Oberstein at the end of 2028.

The works were originally intended to be sold. Biontech explained that this was not possible because of the “currently difficult market and investment environment”. In order to make the site closures socially acceptable, additional severance pay conditions were agreed with the group works council. Biontech did not initially provide any details.

The Marburg plant has so far produced mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccines as well as plasmid DNA, an important starting material for mRNA vaccines and cell therapies. It is located on the site of the historic Behringwerke in Marburg. Biontech once took it over from the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis and invested millions.

In Idar-Oberstein, among other things, therapeutics for early clinical development phases are produced, and the site in Tübingen is the headquarters of Curevac, the former competitor in the race for a corona vaccine. Biontech announced its takeover in the summer of 2025, and the billion-dollar transaction dragged on for months.

The Mainz company had already announced in the spring that Biontech no longer wanted to operate the three locations. They justified this with insufficient utilization, excess capacity, cost savings and the focus on cancer medicine.

At that time, Curevac founder Ingmar Hoerr accused Biontech of deception. When taking over Curevac, it was agreed to create a mutually beneficial company. That was thrown out the window.

Internal experts and professional brokers had sounded out the sales of the locations, explained Biontech. International, national and medium-sized companies and investors were addressed who, among other things, are active in the production of mRNA, antibodies and plasmids as well as in cell and gene therapy. There were audits and confidential discussions for all locations, but there was no conclusion in the cases of Marburg, Tübingen and Idar-Oberstein.

Things were different at the subsidiary JPT Peptide Technologies GmbH in Berlin, a provider of services for the research, development and analysis of peptides. These are short chains of amino acids. The workforce of around 130 positions was taken over by the Dubag Group, based in Munich.

Biontech, together with its US partner Pfizer, once received the first market approval for a vaccine against Covid-19 and earned billions from it. The company became world famous, as did its co-founders, the couple Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci. But demand for the Covid-19 vaccine has been declining for several years, and the company does not yet have any other approved product.

Biontech, with around 7,200 employees worldwide, has been in a process of change and restructuring for years. Research is underway on a whole range of new products, particularly in oncology. The company also relies on mRNA-based immunotherapies and antibody-drug conjugates. The aim is to deliver chemotherapy active ingredients more specifically to cancer cells using antibodies.

All of this costs a lot of money, so Biontech is making losses. In the first six months of this year, the bottom line was a loss of 1.35 billion euros (previous year: 802.4 million) - and that at a time when the central heads Şahin and Türeci are leaving Biontech. They will do this by the end of this year at the latest and plan to dedicate themselves to developing the next generation of mRNA-based drugs in a new company.

It has been clear since last week that the new company will bear the name Arife and will also have its headquarters in Mainz. Şahin and Türeci want to remain shareholders in Biontech.

Şahin's successor as CEO of Biontech will be Guido Oelkers by February 1, 2027 at the latest. In the 1990s, he worked for Hoechst AG, which no longer exists, and now comes from the Swedish biopharmaceutical company Swedish Orphan Biovitrum (Sobi), which he has headed since 2017.