The European Patent Office (EPO) on Thursday awarded a prize to late Chinese virologist and cervical cancer expert Zhou Jian and Australian immunologist Ian Frazer for developing the world's first cervical cancer vaccine.

At a ceremony here attended by more than 400 international guests, the EPO granted the Popular Prize of the European Inventor Award 2015 to Frazer and Sun Xiaoyi, the widow of Zhou Jian.

Since 2006, the European Inventor Award has been presented annually by the EPO to honor inventive individuals and teams all over the world whose pioneering work contributes to technological progress and economic growth and improves people's daily life.

The award has five prize categories, including Industry, Research, Small-and-medium sized Enterprises, Non-european countries, and Lifetime achievement, to which a new prize category -- Popular Prize -- was added in 2013.

The Popular Prize is decided by the public who vote for their favorite inventions from the 15 finalists online during about six weeks before the award ceremony.

"The public's choice was clear this year, with the Australian-Chinese research team receiving more than 32 percent of the 47,000 votes cast online," said the EPO in a statement.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), cervical cancer is the second most common cancer amid women living in less developed regions, with estimated 445,000 new cases reported in 2012.

In 2012, approximately 270,000 women died from cervical cancer, and more than 85 percent of these deaths occurred in low- and middle-income countries.

"Developing a vaccine has saved countless lives and also saved many women from a protracted and painful course of treatment, involving surgery and chemotherapy," said EPO President Benoit Battistelli.

"The award shows how grateful people are to Ian Frazer and Jian Zhou for this pioneering invention," he said, "The Popular Prize thus takes on a very special meaning this year."

Zhou and Frazer met at the University of Cambridge in 1989 and later started to work together on the vaccine against Human papillomavirus (HPV), a major cause of cervical cancer, at the University of Queensland in Australia.

In 1991, they succeeded in making a virus-like particle resembling the HPV shell, from which the vaccine against HPV would ultimately be made. In 2006, seven years after Zhou's unexpected death at the age of 42 from hepatitis, U.S. pharmaceutical company Merck & Co marketed this vaccine with the name "Gardasil".

According to the EPO, Gardasil is now used in 121 countries and has been administered more than 125 million times. The WHO and public health agencies in Australia, Canada, Europe and the U.S. recommend vaccination against HPV for young women aged nine to 25.

(Source: Xinhua)