Biontech founders found new company Arife – patent dispute with old management escalated

The Biontech founders Özlem Türeci and Ugur Sahin are moving into the future with big plans - but they still can't get rid of their past. The pair's new company now has a name, Arife, and an associated register entry, but there is still no certainty as to which patents and active ingredients from the Biontech legacy it will be able to launch at the turn of the year.

And that's because, according to research by my colleagues Annika Keilen and Helena Smolak, a fight broke out between the founding couple and the management of their previous company over this very inheritance. An employee describes the situation like this:

Türeci, for example, is said to have talked about “expropriating his own company”. And so the separation of the two companies, which was supposed to give the research couple more freedom in researching their hoped-for mRNA cancer therapies, degenerated into a mud fight.

The situation is not made any easier by the fact that there is hardly any precedent: two founders leave a company of this size to found a company that is at the same time an offshoot, partner and rival for the same people.