CAPTION: Germany's Paul Ehrlich Prize awarded to BioNTech vaccine developers. (picture alliance/dpa)
The developers of the German BioNTech coronavirus vaccine expect that the messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology used in it will soon used to fight other diseases.
"We believe we will see a number of successes in the next five to 10 years," BioNTech founder Ugur Sahin said in Frankfurt.
Together with his wife Özlem Türeci and her colleague Katalin Karikó, Sahin is due to receive the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize in the city on Monday evening.
It is one of the most prestigious medical prizes in Germany and comes with €120,000 ($132,000) in prize money.
The fact that they succeeded in developing a vaccine against the coronavirus in only 10 months has had a major impact on medicine, Sahin said. "The success is the beginning of an era for mRNA therapeutics."
The technology is already being tested against various infectious diseases and cancer, but the treatment of autoimmune or heart muscle diseases is also conceivable.
For the first time in the 70-year history of the award, the winners of two years will be honoured at the same prize-giving event. Last year's award ceremony in Frankfurt's St Paul's Church was cancelled due to the pandemic.
The prize for 2021 will be awarded to the US microbiologist Bonnie Bassler. Michael Silverman, who was honoured together with her, could not come to Frankfurt. They discovered how bacteria communicate with each other, opening the way to the development of a completely new type of antibiotics.
The Young Scientist Prizes will go to biologist Elvira Mass from Bonn for 2021 and Laura Hinze from Hanover for 2022.
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