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Dr Yannic Bartsch's TWINCORE junior research group "Antiviral Antibody Omics" is being funded as a Helmholtz Young Investigator Group (HYIG). Over the next five years, the immunologist will receive a total of 1.5 million euros, half of which will be funded by the Helmholtz Association and half by the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig. Bartsch already began his work at TWINCORE in January. He is researching the role of antibody responses in infections.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically demonstrated that the development of effective agents against viral pathogens is of great importance for global health. Although effective vaccines are available for many viral diseases, there is an urgent need for new and effective therapeutic treatments. At the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS), the team led by Prof Rolf Müller is researching novel active substances for the treatment of infections. In their latest studies, the researchers were able to identify two new natural product families with promising activity against viruses. Their results have now been published in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

Infection with SARS-CoV-2 leads to severe disease in some people, whereas others do not get ill or only experience mild disease. What causes these differences is not fully understood. It is already known that an overactive innate immune system is causing severe COVID-19 disease, but it is unclear how this is regulated. A team led by Prof Yang Li, Director at the Centre for Individualised Infection Medicine (CiiM) and head of department “Computational Biology for Individualised Medicine” at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI), has come a step closer to answering this question. The researchers addressed the question to what extent the course of disease is genetically or epigenetically regulated. The CiiM is a joint initiative by the HZI and Hannover Medical School (MHH). In addition to Li, the team included other scientists from the HZI and the RESIST cluster of excellence.

In the ImageTox project, the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS) and the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security are pooling their expertise in the fields of drug discovery and artificial intelligence (AI). Using state-of-the-art machine learning methods, the two Saarbrücken institutes aim to make research into the modes of action of new drugs more efficient. The project is an initiative within the Helmholtz Medical Security, Privacy, and AI Research Center (HMSP), which brings together leading experts from the fields of IT security, data privacy and AI, and medicine to solve pressing medical challenges. ImageTox is funded with 200,000 euros from Helmholtz Imaging, an initiative to promote imaging research.

Systematically attenuating DNA targeting activity can achieve CRISPR-driven editing in bacteria, greatly boosting colony counts and even increasing the frequency of precise genome editing. This was shown in a study of the Helmholtz Institute Würzburg (HIRI) in collaboration with the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig. The findings were published today in the journal Nature Communications.