The German pharmaceutical company BioNTech and its US partner Pfizer want to jointly develop a vaccine against shingles.
Shingles, which is also known as herpes zoster, is triggered by a virus that normally causes chickenpox in childhood, after it clears up, however, the virus remains in nerve cells for life and can cause shingles at a later stage. .
Typical symptoms of this include burning pain, followed by a blistering spread of the skin. In rare cases, nerve pain can persist for long periods after the rash is gone.
It will be the first vaccine of its kind based on messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology, which has already been used for the coronavirus vaccine, the companies jointly announced Wednesday.
Clinical trials are expected to begin in the second half of this year.
According to the German national disease control body, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), around 300,000 people in Germany contract shingles each year, about 5 percent of them severely.
There is a standard vaccine with an inactivated vaccine in two doses.
The two companies said the new vaccine will use antigen technology developed by Pfizer and the BioNTech mRNA process.
They plan to share development costs as well as gross profits from future product sales.
dpa / NAN
