Three times 500,000 euros start-up funding for TUM spin-offs

Triple success at m4 Award

Antibiotic-resistant germs are a major problem that will become massively more acute in the coming years. The idea of treating infections with resistant germs with bacteriophages, i.e. viruses that infect bacteria, has been around for almost 100 years. So far, however, the approach has failed to catch on because the production of phages has not been scalable and had to take place in the pathogenic host bacteria.

The TUM start-up Invitris has now developed a technology that can be used for the first time to produce genetically optimized bacteriophages for the treatment of antibiotic-resistant infections in vitro. All members of the team come from the Chair of Physics of Synthetic Biological Systems under the direction of Prof. Friedrich Simmel.

Despite significant medical advances, atherosclerotic diseases such as myocardial infarction and stroke remain the leading cause of death worldwide. A major problem is the residual inflammatory risk of in patients that are otherwise on a well-controlled lipid-lowering treatment plan.

With the prize money, Prof. Jürgen Bernhagen's lab at LMU together with Prof. Aphrodite Kapurniotu’s lab at TUM aims to develop chemokine receptor mimics as a new class of drug leads to selectively inhibit atherosclerosis-causing chemokines for the huge pharmaceutical market of cardiovascular diseases.