On Jul. 9, 2019, Vanderbilt Vaccine Center announced that Director James Crow Jr., MD, had been awarded half of the Future Insight Prize by Merck of Germany for his work as a vaccine pioneer for Ebola and other viruses.

Half of the company’s 1 million Euro ($1.1 million) Future Insight Prize went to Vanderbilt University Medical Center to support Crowe’s research and half to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to support Pardis Sabeti, DPhil, MD, who develops genetic strategies to stop viruses like Ebola.

Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, which is not affiliated with the United States-based Merck & Co. Inc., presented the prize July 9 during a ceremony at company headquarters in Darmstadt. The annual Future Insight Prize was established in 2018 “to stimulate groundbreaking science and innovative development of key products or technologies, to bring meaningful visions to life for the benefit of humanity,” according to Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany.

Crowe and his colleagues are on the cutting edge of developing innovative technologies for the isolation and study of antiviral antibodies and for significantly advancing, through their pioneering work in computational immunology, the rational design of vaccines and antibodies.

They have isolated human monoclonal antibodies for many pathogenic viruses, including Zika, HIV, dengue, influenza, Ebola, West Nile, norovirus, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and rotavirus. Their research has led to patents and licensures for several neutralizing antibodies and vaccines, some of which have progressed to clinical trials.