Prof. Andreas Keller heads the department “Clinical Bioinformatics” at the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS), a site of the HZI in cooperation with Saarland University. He uses computational methods to investigate how bacteria, as producers of natural products, interact with humans and how they can trigger diseases or even protect against them. A special focus of the research is on the regulatory mechanisms of non-coding RNAs.
The Scientific Director of the HZI, Prof. Josef Penninger, heads the newly established "Innovative Organoid Research" department. Together with his team, he investigates the genetic causes of diseases and uses organoids, i.e. miniature organs grown in cell culture, among other things. Organoids can also be used to study infections in detail, carry out vaccine tests and develop innovative therapeutic approaches.
Prof. Marc Stadler's department “Microbial Drugs” searches for antibiotically active natural substances in fungi and soil bacteria. Due to the increasing spread of antibiotic resistance among dangerous pathogens, current drugs are increasingly losing their effectiveness, meaning that new drug candidates are urgently needed. Stadler also develops analytical methods for the search and structural elucidation of secondary substances and establishes their production processes on a pre-industrial scale.
This year’s list of “Highly-cited researchers” comprises of 6886 researchers.
