The projects PROTAC and BacDefense were selected for the first SPRIND Challenge (‘A quantum shift for new antiviral agents’) by the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation and will each receive up to EUR 700,000 in the first year of the three-year competition.
The PROTAC team led by Prof. Mark Brönstrup at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) pursues the idea of not only blocking viral proteins temporarily but degrading them completely using the body’s own cells. The team is working on artificial molecules that trigger cellular degradation mechanisms by bringing viral components in close proximity to the cell’s quality control proteins.
The BacDefense team led by Prof. Chase Beisel at the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI) strives to harness the broad range of bacterial defence mechanisms against viral invasion for therapy development. The team is looking for strategies that could be effectively transferred to human cells.
The third project, LEOPARD, was awarded funding of up to EUR 733,000 under the GO-Bio initial programme sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. It is led by Daphne Collias, a post-doc in Chase Beisel’s lab at HIRI. The goal is to advance the award-winning technology further towards commercialization. LEOPARD is a new, highly multiplexable diagnostic approach based on CRISPR RNAs. It allows an almost infinite number of markers to be analyzed in one test. It holds strong potential for improving efficiency and precision when diagnosing not only infectious diseases, but also other conditions, such as cancer and rare genetic disorders.
Ascenion is closely collaborating with the HZI and HIRI scientists to support them in all aspects relating to IP and the potential commercialization of their work.
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