A German molecular biologist has won Hong Kong’s prestigious Shaw Prize this year for his development of a cutting-edge imaging technology that helps scientists understand how viruses attack the human body and come up with new treatments.
Professor Wolfgang Baumeister, director emeritus and scientific member of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Germany, was on Tuesday named one of the winners of the Shaw Prize, dubbed the “Nobel Prize of the East”.
Baumeister was awarded the 2025 Shaw Prize in life science and medicine for his pioneering development and use of cryogenic electron tomography, or cryo-ET, an imaging technique that enabled 3D visualisation of biological samples such as proteins.
“In general, there are three areas that benefit most from this cutting-edge technology: virology; cancer treatment and diagnostics; and study in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s,” said Shaw Prize Council member Professor Justin Wu Che-yuen, the associate dean of health systems at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s medical faculty.
He said the technology helped scientists understand how viruses attacked the human body and to develop new treatments, such as vaccines.
In terms of cancer and neurodegenerative diseases, the technology revealed how abnormal proteins accumulated in cells, how the proteins interacted with other cellular components and how they responded to current treatments.
This understanding could lead to new early detection strategies and therapeutics, Wu said.
