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With viral disease emergence expected to accelerate, preparing for possible future pandemics is paramount. Beyond saving lives during outbreaks, robust pandemic preparedness safeguards economies, sustains societal functioning, and reinforces the resilience of global systems. The new EU project COMBINE (“Comparative Signature of Marburg Virus Cell Activation as a Blueprint for the Identification of Antiviral Targets against Newly Emerging Viruses”) acknowledges that understanding how viruses infiltrate host cells is crucial to combating emerging infectious diseases. The project sets out to advance our understanding of how viruses enter cells, using the Marburg Virus (MARV) as a model, and to create a blueprint for identifying new targets for antiviral strategies – a critical cornerstone of pandemic preparedness. Coordinated by the German Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI), COMBINE brings together seven partners from five European countries and will receive a total funding of 7.2 million euros over the next five years through the European Union’s “Horizon Europe” Framework Programme for Research and Innovation.

A hospital is a place where you generally don't like to go, but are glad that it's there when you need it. It's called ‘clinically clean’. But it is precisely here that we also encounter the term “hospital germ” – an ominous reminder that a place of healing can also pose a health risk. These pathogenic germs are often so resilient that only a few drugs are effective against them. Prof. Susanne Häußler, head of the department “Molecular Bacteriology” at the HZI and TWINCORE in Hannover, studies how these multi-resistant bacteria develop. In the HZI podcast InFact, she explains how faster diagnostics can also improve treatment.

A team of scientists at the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI) in Würzburg and the University of Regensburg has unveiled insights into how HIV-1, the virus responsible for AIDS, skillfully hijacks cellular machinery for its own survival. By dissecting the molecular interplay between the virus and its host, the researchers identified novel strategies that HIV-1 employs to ensure its replication while suppressing the host’s cellular defenses. The study was published in the journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology.

Antibiotics are a double-edged sword – they should be as toxic as possible to pathogenic bacteria while being harmless to the cells of the human body. An international research team led by the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS) has now developed drug candidates that achieve precisely that. The new molecules target a metabolic pathway that only occurs in bacterial cells, thus sparing human cells. The team published its results in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

Researchers at the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI) and the Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) in Würzburg have identified a protein and a group of small ribonucleic acids (sRNAs) in Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron, which regulate sugar metabolism. These discoveries shed light on how this gut microbe adapts to varying nutritional conditions. The findings deepen our understanding of this bacterium's role in the human gut and may pave the way for new therapeutic strategies to promote health through the microbiota. The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.

Researchers at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) have developed a promising new vaccine technology. Their studies to date show that just one dose of vaccine leads to effective and long-lasting immune protection. The basis of this so-called MCMV vaccine vector technology is the mouse cytomegalovirus (MCMV). It acts as a carrier virus that introduces selected antigens of a pathogen to be vaccinated against into the body. In the follow-up project VIVA-VEK-2, which was launched at the HZI at the beginning of January, a proof-of-concept vaccine candidate against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is now to be produced and tested for efficacy and tolerability. The researchers believe that with the new vaccine technology, one vaccine dose could possibly even provide lifelong protection. The project is funded by the GO-Bio initial program of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) over two years with a funding volume of one million euros.