Before Ingmar Hoerr ever held a pipette professionally, he drove an ambulance. From 1988 to 1990, he served his civilian service as a paramedic with the German Red Cross in Nürtingen, near Stuttgart, after finishing school at an agricultural high school. It was a long way from the labs of Tübingen, but it points to a man who learned early that medicine is about timing.
He was born in Neckarsulm in 1968 and studied biology at the University of Tübingen from 1990, including a year at Madurai Kamaraj University in India. His doctoral work, completed in 1999 in Günther Jung's institute in cooperation with Hans-Georg Rammensee's group, asked a plain question. Does mRNA vanish the moment it enters a body? He vaccinated mice with a stabilised RNA construct and showed that it did not decay as quickly as people assumed. On 9 September 1999 he applied for a first patent.
That same month, Hoerr suffered a severe health issue, and the details have not been made public.
A year later, with colleagues Steve Pascolo and Florian von der Mülbe, and with Jung and Rammensee, he founded CureVac in Tübingen. Prizes came first: a Baden-Württemberg innovation prize in 2007, then a 2 million euro EU vaccine prize in 2014. The Gates Foundation funded vaccine projects in 2015, and by 2017 equity investment had reached about 305 million euros and a valuation of 1.4 billion.
Then came 2020. In March, Hoerr was back as CEO after the company replaced its chief executive following a reported meeting with Donald Trump, and a German newspaper claimed the US wanted CureVac to relocate. The company denied any offer. That same month, Hoerr suffered a severe health issue, and the details have not been made public. In June the German state bank KfW paid 300 million euros for about 23 percent, and in August CureVac listed on Nasdaq, raising 213 million dollars.
The fall came in June 2021. The Covid candidate showed 47 percent efficacy, short of the 50 percent target. CureVac dropped it that October and turned to next-generation shots with GSK. In June 2025 BioNTech agreed to buy it in an all-stock deal valued at 1.25 billion dollars, and completed the takeover on 18 December 2025.
The lesson is uncomfortable. Hoerr was early, but early is not the same as first across the line. A technology can be right and the company still lose the race.