Press

Continuous, pesticide-free and sustainable farming of plant-based food inside buildings? Within the project “OrbiPlant®”, the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecu-lar Biology and Applied Ecology IME has developed an innovative, automated plant farming system to make this possible.

As a pioneer in applied research, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft brings together the expertise of 23 separate Fraunhofer facilities to develop new development and production technologies for innovative cell and gene therapeutics, as well as vaccines, in the “Production for Intelligent Medicine” innovation cluster. As a first step of the project, a concept for a modular pilot plant for the auto-matic production of these therapeutics is to be developed combining both In-dustry 4.0 and Health 4.0.

As part of their long-term co-operation the Foundation for Biomedical Research and Innovation at Kobe (FBRI), the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME at Hamburg (Fraunhofer IME) and a Japanese pharmaceutical company have concluded a Joint Research Agreement on Drug Discovery for Dementia.

Researchers of the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME together with the Justus-Liebig-University of Giessen analysed the venom of wasp spiders and discovered a subset of novel biomolecules. Their results have recently been published in "Biomolecules".

The University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) and Fraunhofer IME want to pave the way for new therapies against multiple sclerosis. The aim of a joint project is to characterize a target protein and further develop suitable drug candidates that specifically prevent the injury of nerve cells, which is responsible for the progressive disability in multiple sclerosis. The project is funded with 1.2 million Euro by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research as part of a program for the validation of disease-related target structures.

The work conducted by an interdisciplinary research team from the Center of Hybrid Nanostructures (University of Hamburg) and the ScreeningPort of the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME in Hamburg made it to the cover of the journal Biomaterials Science.

To date, there is neither a vaccine nor drugs for treating COVID-19 patients available. Researchers of the international consortium iCAIR® are working on the development of novel anti-infective agents to treat or prevent clinically significant diseases of the respiratory tract – and they recently started a project aimed at developing medications to combat the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. The Hamburg site of Fraunhofer IME contributes its expertise in drug discovery and drug repurposing based on automated high-throughput technology to this project.

Fraunhofer IME recently published a preprint article on a repurposing screen of 5.600 known drugs, clinical candidates and bioactives (Fraunhofer IME repurposing collection), which identified multiple inhibitors of SARS-CoV-2 in vitro cellular toxicity in a phenotypic format using human (Caco-2) cells. The study was run by Fraunhofer IME in collaboration with the Goethe-University Frankfurt.

With the "COVID-19 Knowledge Space", Fraunhofer SCAI – together with Fraunhofer IME, Fraunhofer IAIS, the Information Center for Life Sciences ZBMED and other research partners – is opening a new kind of knowledge space with analysis tools and information on COVID-19. This website provides central services that allow access to publicly available data on current COVID-19 research. Fraunhofer IME at its site in Hamburg will contribute its expertise in linking chemical information of drug molecules with antiviral properties against COVID-19 and other data, such as toxicity and possible side effects.

A multinational team of scientists from the UK, Germany, and Spain, have published an authoritative article in the prestigious scientific journal Trends in Plant Science discussing how plant biotechnology can assist in the international response to pandemics, including COVID-19.