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Our immune system successfully defends itself against pathogens on a daily basis - often without us realizing it. We notice other encounters with pathogens through cold symptoms, fever or a red, swollen area. Our immune system is then working at full speed. Prof. Kathrin de la Rosa wants to be one step ahead of the pathogens. Since 2024, she has headed the department “Personalized Immunotherapy” at the Centre for Individualized Infection Medicine (CiiM) - a joint institution of Hannover Medical School and the HZI. In the HZI podcast InFact, she reports on how she wants to improve individual defense mechanisms in people whose immune system cannot cope with the pathogen on its own and explains why she is copying tricks from nature.

Prof. Josef Penninger, Scientific Director of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig, has been appointed honorary professor of the Faculty of Life Sciences at Technische Universität Braunschweig. The faculty honors his outstanding achievements in cell and molecular biology research, including the cloning of the SARS-CoV-2 receptor, and his outstanding ability to network scientific institutions.

Colistin is a last-resort antibiotic that is usually only used for severe infections with resistant bacteria. This is due to its severe kidney-damaging side effects, which occur in around 30 percent of treated patients. A research team at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) and the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) has now been able to produce an inactivated, harmless form of colistin that is only activated in the body with the help of chemical switches. In this so-called click-to-release technique, the chemical switches are specifically bound to the disease-causing bacteria. The administered masked colistin is therefore activated specifically at the site of action. The researchers hope that this could reduce side effects. The study was published in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

According to the WHO, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the ten greatest threats to global health. In the EU alone, around 35,000 people die every year from antibiotic-resistant infections. The WHO estimates that 1.27 million deaths worldwide in 2019 were directly attributable to drug-resistant infections.

Microorganisms do not just colonize the body of mammals during infections. Billions of microbes can be found on and in healthy humans and animals at any given time, communicating with each other via chemical signals and thus influencing their health. In two studies, researchers from the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS), Saarland University and Saarland University Hospital have now conducted a detailed study of the microbiome, i.e. the totality of all microorganisms, in humans and zoo animals. The aim was to identify starting points for strategies for the treatment and diagnosis of diseases. The researchers published their results in two articles in the journal Nature Communications. The HIPS is a site of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in collaboration with Saarland University.

To prepare us for future pandemics, researchers at the Helmholtz Institute for One Health (HIOH) not only look at the pathogens, but also at how changes in the environment and nature - including those caused by us - influence how pathogens have developed in the past. Prof. Sébastien Calvignac-Spencer heads the research group "Evolution of Pathogens" at HIOH and uses genetic changes to retrospectively analyse what could have caused this change. In the HZI podcast InFact, he explains how this allows valuable conclusions to be drawn about how today's pathogens could develop.