Katalin Karikó and the founding directors of the German biotechnology company BioNTech, which employs a world-renowned Hungarian scientist, will receive one of the most prestigious German scientific awards, the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize, in 2022, the board of trustees of the Paul Ehrlich Foundation announced on Tuesday .
Katalin Karikó, Özlem Türeci and Ugur Sahin will receive the prize of 120,000 euros (42 million forints) for their preventive and therapeutic research and development of messenger RNA (mRNA).
The "technological platform they created can trigger a paradigm shift" in several fields of medicine. The outstanding success of their work is a vaccine that protects against the disease (Covid-19) caused by the new type of coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) with extraordinary efficiency, which plays a decisive role in curbing the coronavirus pandemic, the announcement states.
MTI, Photo: MH/Péter Papajcsik
