CureVac Brand Guidelines: The 2000 Tübingen mRNA Company Now Part of BioNTech

Five founders and one molecule.

CureVac was founded in 2000 in Tübingen, the university town in Baden-Württemberg, by Ingmar Hoerr, Steve Pascolo, Florian von der Mülbe, Günther Jung and Hans-Georg Rammensee, English Wikipedia says. Its work rested on messenger RNA, or mRNA, the molecule that carries a cell’s instructions for making proteins, which CureVac set out to use as the basis for vaccines and medicines for infectious diseases, cancer and rare diseases.

Recognition came while the company was still small. In 2007 it received the innovation prize of the state of Baden-Württemberg and won the nationwide Weconomy competition run by the business newspaper Handelsblatt and the Wissensfabrik initiative, according to English Wikipedia, and in March 2014 it won a European Commission prize intended to stimulate new vaccine technologies. In 2018 it had about 375 employees.

Much of CureVac’s first two decades was built on partnerships. Wikipedia lists a collaboration with Janssen, part of Johnson & Johnson, on influenza vaccines in October 2013; partnerships with the Cancer Research Institute and Ludwig Cancer Research on cancer immunotherapy; a licence agreement with Sanofi Pasteur in July 2014; and, in September 2014, a licence to Boehringer Ingelheim for a lung-cancer candidate, CV9202. In 2015 the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, already an investor, agreed to fund vaccine projects on CureVac’s platform, the company began a collaboration with the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, and it announced a United States hub in Boston. Under an agreement with Eli Lilly, it began building a production facility in 2016.

In February 2019 the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations awarded CureVac a grant to develop what it called an “RNA printer,” a prototype system for making mRNA candidates quickly in several locations, and in July 2020 CureVac and Tesla reached an agreement on portable “RNA microfactories” based on that work, Wikipedia says.

A listing, a candidate and a patent case.

The COVID-19 pandemic put CureVac in the public eye. In March 2020 Ingmar Hoerr returned to lead the company in place of Daniel Menichella, English Wikipedia says. In June 2020 the German federal government announced that its development bank, KfW, would invest in CureVac and hold a stake of about 23%. On 14 August 2020 CureVac began trading on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker CVAC.

Its COVID-19 candidate, CVnCoV, entered clinical trials in June 2020, and a large Phase III trial began in December 2020, with Bayer supporting clinical work and logistics. In February 2021 CureVac began a rolling submission to the European Medicines Agency. After it reported the Phase III results in June 2021, the company announced in October 2021 that it would stop developing CVnCoV and concentrate instead on a second-generation mRNA programme with GSK, Wikipedia says; the first trial of the follow-up candidate, CV2CoV, was moved to early 2022.

CureVac also went to court over the technology. It accused BioNTech and Pfizer of infringing patents covering the engineering of mRNA molecules, including sequence changes meant to improve stability and protein production and formulations specific to the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, and the two companies counter-sued, pharmaphorum reported on 8 August 2025. That month CureVac and GSK announced a settlement of the litigation in the United States with BioNTech and Pfizer, under which BioNTech and Pfizer received a non-exclusive licence to the disputed patents; disputes outside the United States were to be settled if BioNTech’s takeover of CureVac went ahead. BioNTech said the settlement was not an admission of liability.

How vaccine makers present themselves.

Vaccine makers sell to health ministries, procurement agencies, hospitals and clinicians long before any patient sees a pack, and their visual language reflects that audience. The imagery tends to stay close to the work itself: gloved hands holding a vial up to the light, rows of filled vials on a stainless line, and researchers in lab coats at a bench or a microscope. The point of these pictures is to show process and care rather than spectacle.

Production is a second recurring subject. Company photographs often show clean production suites, with staff in full gowns, hoods and masks behind glass, and long views of filling lines, bioreactors and freezers. For mRNA companies in particular, the plant itself has become part of the story, and new sites tend to be photographed and announced as milestones in their own right.

A third strand is global health. Vaccine makers frequently show clinics, community health workers and the cold chain: insulated boxes, refrigerated trucks and storage rooms that keep doses within a temperature range on the way to where they are used. Maps, partner logos and the names of public bodies often sit alongside these images, because much of the business runs through governments, international agencies and non-profit funders.

The trade has its own meeting places. Conferences such as the World Vaccine Congress and ESCMID Global, the congress of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, bring companies, researchers and buyers together. In a field where so many pictures show similar vials, gowns and laboratories, a name, a typeface and a single accent colour often do much of the work of telling one company from another.

From a rival to a subsidiary.

The two German mRNA companies then combined. In June 2025 BioNTech, based in Mainz, announced that it intended to acquire CureVac in an all-share transaction, English Wikipedia says. BioNTech made an exchange offer to CureVac’s shareholders, and when the subsequent offering period expired on 18 December 2025, about 86.75% of CureVac’s shares had been tendered and BioNTech closed the acquisition, HTWorld reported that day. BioNTech’s chief executive, Ugur Sahin, together with Sierk Poetting and Ramón Zapata-Gomez, formed CureVac’s new management board after the former members resigned, and BioNTech said CureVac would keep its existing organisational processes while it carried out strategic, operational and scientific reviews.

BioNTech said it expected to complete the compulsory acquisition of the remaining shares in January 2026, after which CureVac’s shares would stop trading. Börse Express reported in January 2026 that the post-offer reorganisation took effect on 6 January, folding CureVac into a BioNTech subsidiary, with the Nasdaq delisting planned for the middle of the month. BioNTech’s supervisory board chairman, Helmut Jeggle, described the deal as bringing together “two of Germany’s early mRNA firms.”

CureVac therefore no longer exists as an independent listed company. Its website now says that “CureVac is now part of the BioNTech Group” and sends visitors to BioNTech’s own site, while a careers page continues under the CureVac name.

For a design guide, CureVac shows how a research company’s name can live on inside the business that bought it, after twenty-five years as an independent Tübingen firm. Compare BioNTech, its owner since December 2025, and GSK, its long-time mRNA partner. For this guide we use a deep Neckar green, moss and a pale sage with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep CureVac’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.