The Georg Friedrich Götz Award is presented annually to two researchers who are habilitated at the University of Zurich and can demonstrate outstanding, internationally recognized achievements in the area of basic or clinical research. The award comes with total prize money of CHF 30,000.
The Georg Friedrich Götz Foundation is run as part of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Zurich (UZH) and is presented annually to two researchers who are habilitated at the University of Zurich and can demonstrate outstanding, internationally recognized achievements in the area of basic or clinical research. And this with a long-standing tradition: Since 1969, the annual Georg Friedrich Götz Award has been awarded to more than 100 researchers in recognition of their work. Since 2019, the UZH Foundation has been in charge of the foundation’s business operations.
The foundation’s founder Georg Friedrich Götz was a successful German entrepreneur, who moved to Switzerland in 1960. He had to travel to Zurich several times for operations, including for lung cancer and for bowel disease. In gratitude for the care he received, he started a foundation at the University of Zurich in 1964 which each year awards a prize for progress in medicine.
The Georg Friedrich Götz-Prize is presented annually to two researchers who are habilitated at the University of Zurich and can demonstrate outstanding, internationally recognized achievements in the area of basic or clinical research. The award comes with total prize money of CHF 30,000.
The jury comprises the following members:
The advisory board is made up of the following members:
Raphael J. Morscher, MD-PhD
Cancer remains one of the leading causes of death among children in Switzerland, with high-risk diseases such as neuroblastoma posing major challenges to achieving long-term cures. Researchers at the University Children’s Hospital Zurich, led by Raphael J. Morscher within the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) Children and Cancer, are investigating how pediatric tumors use nutrients and metabolic pathways to survive — with the goal of developing more effective and less toxic therapies.
Using high-resolution mass spectrometry, the team systematically analyzed the metabolism of high-risk neuroblastomas and identified a critical vulnerability in polyamine metabolism. This metabolic “Achilles’ heel” opens the door to new therapeutic strategies. The researchers demonstrated that depletion of polyamines using the clinically approved drug DFMO can be dramatically enhanced through precise dietary interventions or externally administered enzymes that restrict the availability of specific amino acids.
This combined metabolic stress forces aggressive neuroblastoma cells to abandon their malignant behavior and transition into a differentiated, less harmful cellular state. These findings establish a promising new precision medicine approach based on tumor metabolism.
Building on these discoveries, the University Children’s Hospital Zurich is now collaborating with international partners to advance these concepts into clinical trials for children with cancer.
The study was published in Nature and was additionally highlighted in both the journal’s editorial and cover feature.
(from left to right) Dean of the Faculty of Medicine Frank Rühli, Prize Winner Raphael Morscher, Director of University Medicine Zurich Beatrice Beck Schimmer
Over 100 prizes have already been awarded since the foundation was established. An overview of all previous winners of the Goetz Prize can be downloaded here:
