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Dendritic cells act as the guardians of our immune system. They are lurking for foreign invaders, swallow them, break them into pieces and present the fragments on the cell surface. When the dendritic cells and their pathogen fragments come into contact with specialised white blood cells, called T cells, these T cells are activated and they can destroy the infected cells. Researchers from TWINCORE, a joint facility of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) and the Hannover Medical School (MHH), have now discovered how the uptake of antigens and presentation of antigen fragments on human dendritic cells are regulated in terms of time and space. These findings form the foundation for the development of improved vaccines. The study has just been published in the journal Blood Advances.

On 20 February 2019, the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) and Evotec AG announced their cooperation, scheduled for three years initially. They aim to develop new antibiotics that overcome resistant bacterial pathogens – a global health threat. The research activities will initially focus on the optimisation of cystobactamids, which are natural anti-bacterial substances that have a novel chemical scaffold and are effective against the most harmful Gram-negative bacteria. The research cooperation with Evotec resulted from an intensive preceding cooperation of the HZI, its Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland, and the Leibniz University Hannover, supported by the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF).

For the characterization of new bioactive metabolites from tropical Basidiomycetes, a division of fungi, Dr Clara Chepkirui of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Brunswick was awarded this year’s DECHEMA-Doktorandenpreis für Naturstoff-Forschung. While doing her doctorate in the HZI department Microbial Drugs, headed by Prof Marc Stadler, Chepkirui discovered the microporenic acids, which proved effective against bacterial biofilms.

He was one of the most versatile German researchers and a popular representative of science. Manfred Eigen, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and one of the founders of the Gesellschaft für Biotechnologische Forschung in Braunschweig – today the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI). Manfred Eigen died on 6 February, 2019, at the age of 91.

Prof Markus Cornberg, a medical doctor by training, is the new Clinical Director of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig. Cornberg will also become director of the Centre for Individualised Infection Medicine (CiiM), a collaboration of the HZI and the Hannover Medical School (MHH). He is the successor to Prof Michael Manns, who resigned from both positions due to his inauguration as president of the MHH effective 1 January 2019.

Many common antibiotics are increasingly losing their effectiveness against multi-resistant pathogens, which are becoming ever more prevalent. Bacteria use natural means to acquire mechanisms that protect them from harmful substances. For instance against the agent albicidin: Harmful Gram-negative bacteria possess a protein that binds and inactivates albicidin. The underlying resistance mechanism has been investigated at atomic resolution by scientists from the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) and the associated Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS). The scientists discovered that this protein not only binds the antibiotic, but also promotes its chemical modification. Concurrently, it promotes its own production such that it can inactivate albicidin even more efficiently. The results of this study have been published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.