BioNTech winds down COVID jab manufacturing, shedding staff

BioNTech has said it will halt COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing, targeting annual savings of around €500 million, and hand responsibility for producing the shots to its partner Pfizer.

The announcement came in the German biotech's first-quarter update, in which it revealed plans to close manufacturing facilities in Germany and Singapore with the loss of around 1,860 jobs – around 22% of its total workforce of 8,400.

The closed sites include some that came with its $1.25 billion takeover of CureVac last year, and BioNTech has said it hopes to complete the wind-down in the first quarter of 2027. It is also considering the "partial or total sale" of the facilities, if buyers can be found.

Germany's IGBCE union, the third-largest in the country, has criticised the job cuts, decrying them as an act of "social irresponsibility." A spokesperson for the union said: "For short-term financial reasons, they are radically reducing production capacity, thereby damaging the resilience of Germany as a pharmaceutical and biotech hub."

The IGBCE is incensed that the reductions come after years of financial aid from the German government and have been announced alongside a "multi-billion-euro share buyback programme […] that must seem like a mockery to the employees."

The revelation comes a few weeks after BioNTech's co-founders – Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci – announced they would be stepping down at the end of the year in order to set up a new company focused on mRNA technologies.

BioNTech has faced a massive falloff in sales of its COVID-19 vaccines since the end of the pandemic, recording €118 million ($139 million) in revenues in the first three months of this year, and has retained its guidance of €2bn to €2.3bn in full-year 2026 sales.

The company is now focusing its efforts on cancer therapies – it is retaining some manufacturing capacity for these at its Mainz headquarters, as well as in China from its acquisition of Biotheus in 2024 – and said in its update that it has started a raft of new phase 3 trials of lead candidate pumitamig, a PD-L1xVEGF bispecific antibody, in collaboration with partner Bristol Myers Squibb.

BioNTech is targeting first regulatory filings for pumitamig this year, along with six late-stage trial readouts expected across immunomodulator, antibody-drug conjugate, and mRNA cancer immunotherapies.

"We will continue to focus on accelerating our key strategic programmes as we remain steadfast in our vision to translate our science into survival for patients living with cancer," said Şahin.