Healthcare
Germany is a European Leader in Cancer Research
A multi-billion-dollar deal for German company BioNTech is the latest indication of the central role Europe’s largest economy plays in attempts to cure the deadly disease.
Jun 04, 2025
BioNTech – which shot to global prominence as an inventor of one of the main vaccines against Covid – has signed an agreement worth up USD 11.1 billion with US pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) for a newly developed cancer medication called BNT327.
The deal, which includes $3.5 billion in unconditional payments, underpins BioNTech's ambition to develop novel cancer treatments and shows that its success as Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine partner was not a one-off achievement.
“If successfully developed, BNT327 could replace the current standard therapy for many tumors,” BioNTech CEO Uğur Şahin told German business newspaper Handelsblatt.
The enormous deal underscores Germany’s prominence in cancer research. According to a European Patent Office (EPO) study, almost 5400 international patent families in oncology between 2010 and 2021 originated in Germany. That was tops in Europe.
Germany also has 208 start-ups specialized in cancer research, the study found. That was third most in Europe, behind the United Kingdom and France.
Almost 40 percent of cancer treatment patents, however, came from universities, research institutes and hospitals. The EPO specifically named the Max Planck Society, the German Cancer Research Center and Heidelberg University as major oncology sites.
