These days, even a “simple” infection can become a deadly threat. Bacteria keep developing new resistances to antibiotics, and presenting the international medical community with a significant problem. There is a desperate need for new medications. The biggest hurdle in developing these new medications is getting them from the laboratory and into clinical trials, bridging the gap from the discovery of new agents to their development by the pharmaceutical industry into potential medications.
Now researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Toxicology and Experimental Medicine ITEM have teamed up with colleagues from the Hannover Medical School (MHH) and Griffith University’s Institute for Glycomics (IfG) in Gold Coast, Australia, in the iCAIR (Fraunhofer International Consortium for Anti-Infective Research) project. They have set themselves the ambitious goal of closing this gap and developing new anti-infective drugs.
As a close-knit research alliance, iCAIR will be working on the development of anti-infective therapies that take new treatment options all the way from the identification of potentially beneficial substances to the preclinical proof of concept.
The development platform established in the iCAIR project will be made available to external partners in addition to its use in proprietary projects. This is geared towards contract research in the pharmaceutical industry as well as small and medium-sized enterprises and publicly funded projects. In the long term, the iCAIR project alliance could lead to a Fraunhofer Project Center and potentially a Fraunhofer Center for new anti-infective drugs.
