On 19 June 2020, the “Innovation Awards 2020-2021 / Austria’s Beste” were announced by the Austrian Association for Consumer Studies (ÖGVS) and the business magazine Trend, in their special issue Top 500. CeMM, the Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences has been awarded with the “Special Prize/Sonderpreis” in the field of organic chemistry and obtained the second-best place in IP category Biochemistry. This acknowledgement confirms CeMM’s status as a leading biomedical research institute in the country and recognizes the institute’s important contribution to world leading innovations and inventions.

The "Innovation Award 2020/2021" is awarded biannually by the Trend magazine and the ÖGVS – Gesellschaft für Verbraucherstudien, a neutral and independent society for consumer studies in Austria. The jury panel examined all companies and research institutes in Austria that have registered and issued at least two worldwide patent families in the period from 1 January 2018 to 31 December 2019. The “Innovation Awards” recognize local companies and organizations that have excelled in one of the 130 classes of the International Patent Classification System (IPC), having an above-average number of granted patent applications and citations.

Protection of intellectual property in the form of patents is part of CeMM’s core strategy to ensure that the research performed in our institute is translated and commercialized for the benefit of society. To this end, CeMM has protected inventions related to the treatment of diseases including, diabetes, cancer and inflammation. CeMM’s translational impact also includes spin-off companies, such as Haplogen, Allcyte, MyeloPro, Aelian Biotechnology, and Proxygen, and strategic partnering with industry and pharmaceutical companies to further develop and apply its research results to the benefit of medicine and patients. This allows CeMM to fulfill its mandate to do world-class research in biomedicine, to train researchers and medical doctors in molecular medicine and to pioneer the science that nurtures the precise, personalized, predictive and preventive medicine of the future.

We thank our CeMM scientists, technologists and scientific support staff for providing a constant flow of world-class research results and innovations, and our patent attorney from Vossius & Partner for professional support. We are grateful to ÖGVS and Trend for this recognition!

For more information please visit the ÖGVS website.