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Ahead of the “World Antimicrobial Awareness Week” (November 18-24) 20 national and international organizations from academia, healthcare and the pharmaceutical industry appealed today to G7 governments to step up efforts to tackle the problem of growing antibiotic resistance. Their "Joint Statement on Strengthening the Antibiotic R&D Pipeline by Rewarding Innovation" stresses that only an approach involving both the public and private sectors is likely to succeed. The Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) is a member of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres and the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF), which both signed the statement.

Researchers from the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) and partners from the University of Bordeaux have established a mechanism that regulates the migration of individual cells. The study was recently published in Nature Cell Biology and discussed in an accompanying article by renowned experts.

The Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation (SPRIND) has announced the participants of the first SPRIND Challenge “A Quantum Leap for New Antiviral Agents”. From 45 applications from Germany and Europe, the jury selected a total of nine teams. Prof Mark Brönstrup from the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig and Prof Chase Beisel from the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI), a joint institution of the HZI with the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU), convinced the jury with the projects they led. The HZI scientists Prof Carlos A. Guzmán and Dr Christian Sieben are involved in two other projects as cooperation partners. The teams will each receive up to 700,000 euros in the first year of the three-year competition to develop new drug candidates against viral diseases.

The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF) is supporting the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI) in Würzburg - an institution of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research Braunschweig in cooperation with the Julius-Maximilians-University - with up to 733,000 euros. The grant is awarded to Daphne Collias, a post-doc in Chase Beisel’s lab at HIRI, to take the new and award-winning LEOPARD technology a decisive step further towards commercialization. In the future, LEOPARD may help physicians and patients by providing more comprehensive diagnostic information about a patient’s health. The funding is part of the "GO-Bio initial" program from the BMBF and is granted for a period of 24 months.

Nitric oxide (NO) occurs naturally in the human body as a messenger substance. It is considered an all-rounder, as it performs numerous important regulatory functions, including immune defense against pathogens. The exact mode of action of this molecule has now been uncovered by immunologist Prof Andreas Müller from the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Immunology at the University Medical Center Magdeburg together with scientists from the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig. The findings are crucial for the development of new therapeutic approaches for the treatment of infectious diseases, but also of diseases caused by excessive inflammation. The results were published in the renowned journal "Immunity".

The German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) and the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) have developed a concept to form a National Alliance for Pandemic Therapeutics (NA-PATH). They thereby wish to target research and development of widely effective therapeutics in order to be better prepared for future outbreaks due to viral pathogens having pandemic potential. Overcoming the current COVID-19 pandemic will be considerably more difficult due to the deficiency of antiviral active substances.