Steering committee
ABOUT US
Advances in biomedical sciences, technologies and systems approaches have created powerful tools that enable a more holistic picture of a disease state and provide better tailored treatments to a large number of patients. Despite these achievements, significant global health challenges remain, and the current pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 bears bitter witness to the vulnerability of health care systems. Among the most critical unresolved medical challenges are infectious and inflammatory diseases, with complex overarching patterns in the human body, which are not well understood and create not only a significant scientific gap, but also result in a huge number of therapy failures and thus patients´ lives.
Recent successes in using mRNA- based delivery methods, the dawn of a new era for proximity-inducing technologies, as well as use of advances in computational and nanotechnology applications provide toolboxes for basic research and at the same time novel opportunities for tackling unresolved medical needs. Research and development into these scientific approaches at Goethe University Frankfurt and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz have reached a critical stage that makes it ideal to complementarily combine our efforts in a joint initiative named EMTHERA - Emerging Therapeutics.
This research cluster will bring together interdisciplinary basic and clinical scientists to break frontiers by
(i) understanding common/unique causes for infectious and inflammation- and immunity-based disease development,
(ii) defining appropriate therapeutic targets,
(iii) utilizing novel tools to study and develop emerging strategies and new classes of therapeutics for infection, inflammation and impaired immune mechanisms.
Tobias Bopp
Immunology, JGU Mainz
„For me, EMTHERA provides the unique opportunity to work together with excellent scientists in an interdisciplinary fashion on tomorrow's therapies for diseases that are currently incurable.“
Wolfram Ruf
Thrombosis & Hemostasis, IMB & JGU Mainz
„EMTHERA provides tremendous opportunities to leverage excellent expertise and productive synergies in the development of innovative therapeutics addressing the most challenging clinical problems in chronic inflammatory diseases.“
Sandra Ciesek
Virology, GU Frankfurt
„The COVID pandemic has revealed our vulnerability towards emerging pathogens and underlines the severe impact of immune and inflammatory responses on outcome of diseases. EMTHERA helps us to better understand these interfaces.“
Özlem Türeci
Immunotherapy, JGU Mainz
„We will multiply the power of science by working together, and contribute to solving most pressing biomedical challenges. The success of mRNA-based COVID vaccines proves how platform technologies can be smartly employed to achieve the impossible.“
Ivan Đikić
Cell & Molecular Biology, GU Frankfurt
„Enabled by novel tools and technologies, EMTHERA will tackle some of the most challenging biomedical questions. At the same time, it provides the unique opportunity to educate the next generation of truly interdisciplinary scientists.“
Maike Windbergs
Pharmaceutical Technology, GU Frankfurt
„EMTHERA builds a perfect bridge between basic and translational sciences. A better understanding of molecular mechanisms will lead to discovery of novel targets and unique therapeutic strategies, thereby speeding up translation."