The Mainz-based pharmaceutical company Biontech and its American partner Pfizer want to jointly develop a vaccine against shingles.
It should be the first such vaccine based on mRNA technology, which was also used for the corona vaccine, as both companies announced on Wednesday.
The clinical studies are scheduled to begin in the second half of this year.
Shingles or "herpes zoster" is caused by a virus.
It usually causes chickenpox initially in childhood.
After the virus has subsided, however, it remains in the nerve cells for life and can cause shingles at a later point in time.
Typical for this is a burning pain, followed by a mostly half-sided, ribbon-like spread of blisters on the skin.
In rare cases, after the rash has healed, nerve pain may persist for a long time.
According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), around 300,000 people in Germany develop shingles every year, around 5 percent of them seriously.
There is a standard vaccination with an inactivated vaccine in two doses.
According to the company, the new vaccine will use an antigen technology developed by Pfizer and the mRNA process from Biontech. The two companies want to share the development costs as well as the gross profits from future product sales.
"With this collaboration, both companies want to use their know-how and their resources to develop a new mRNA-based vaccine against shingles," said Biontech CEO and co-founder Ugur Sahin.
The aim is to develop an mRNA vaccine "with an advantageous risk profile and high effectiveness".
Similar to the corona vaccine, Pfizer will be granted the right to market the potential vaccine worldwide, with the exception of Germany and Turkey, where Biontech will have the marketing rights as well as in some developing countries that have not yet been specified.