German company wins inducement prize for innovative vaccine technology
German biopharmaceutical company CureVac GmbH has won the EU’s first ever innovation inducement prize. The company received the prize for progress towards a novel technology to bring life-saving vaccines to people across the planet in safe and affordable ways.
The European Commission offered the €2m prize to encourage inventors to overcome one of the biggest barriers to using vaccines in developing countries: the need to keep them stable at any ambient temperature.
Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science, said: “CureVac’s success opens up the possibility of a real European breakthrough in the delivery of vaccines to areas where they are needed most. This technology could save lives – exactly the type of innovation an EU inducement prize should support.”
CureVac’s RNActive vaccine technology is based on messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules that stimulate the immune system. It has the potential to allow the production of vaccines that are protected against both elevated temperature and inadvertent freezing. It would be possible to rapidly produce these vaccines against almost any infectious disease as well as deliver these to the most remote areas of the world. CureVac is currently running a number of clinical trials with these vaccines.
The prize jury highlighted the potential of this technology to achieve large global health benefits, given that it may be applied to many diseases and a number of vaccines and allow the formulating of a combination of vaccines. It could also permit the production of many vaccine units in a single facility.
This is the first time the European Commission has offered a so-called inducement prize to stimulate research and innovation within the EU. An inducement prize sets an ambitious goal, but it does not say how that goal should be achieved or specifically who should achieve it. Building on the first success, more inducement prizes are planned in 2015 under Horizon 2020.
