The Department of Drug Design and Target Validation in Halle develops new molecular strategies for the treatment of neurodegenerative and inflammatory diseases. Staff at the off-site department have extremely comprehensive expertise in industrial, pharma-relevant research.
This primarily includes the identification of new drug targets by analysing potential pathological post-translational modifications, misfolding of proteins as well as their pathological aggregations. "Small molecules" and biological drugs ("biologicals") are developed and tested from the resulting, new treatment concepts. This activity is accompanied by the development of testing procedures for the identification and diagnostic application of biomarkers, which allow the progression of diseases and treatments to be monitored. Besides this, the department also has the necessary expertise to create pharmacologically relevant in-vitro and in-vivo models.
Alongside modern peptide synthesis and protein analytics methods (MALDI-TOF and LC-MS), the off-site department has also developed a wide-ranging spectrum of biophysical methods for characterising therapeutically relevant physiological metabolic pathways, whose key proteins as well as cell-based and pharmacological models are used to characterise innovative chemical and biological drugs.
Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology IZI