Press

In August 2021, after several years of research at Fraunhofer Institute for Translational Medicine and Pharmacology ITMP, a team of scientists has spun-off and created Phialogics, a preclinical-stage biotechnology company dedicated to the development of innovative biologics to treat autoimmune diseases.

Funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), Fraunhofer ITMP, IAIS and IGD, as part of the Fraunhofer Cluster of Excellence for Immune-Mediated Diseases CIMD, together with 25 European partners, are researching an insufficiently understood disease that affects millions of people - psoriatic arthritis - in the "HIPPOCRATES" project.

Fraunhofer launches a new research project, the „e-Pille“, designed to streamline the formulation of new drugs for oral delivery.

Addressing intracellular signal transduction disorders caused by viral or bacterial infections, and the therapy of inflammatory diseases are the main goals of the Frankfurt biomedicine cluster ENABLE, in which Fraunhofer ITMP is also involved. The Hessian state government will fund this project for four years with a total of eight million euros in order to prepare it successfully for the next round of the federal and state excellence strategy.

Fraunhofer ITMP is pioneering the development of a new class of active sub-stances in the PROXIDRUGS project together with seven regional partners, under the leadership of the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. The project has now been designated as a cluster for future by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and will be funded with up to 15 million euros.

The European Joint Programme on Rare Diseases (EJP-RD), established within the Horizon 2020 European Research Framework Program, brings together over 130 institutions from 35 countries. It has focused on preclinical research to develop effective therapies for rare diseases and will now fund two new European consortia with participation of Fraunhofer ITMP called CureMILS and TreatKCNQ with a total of over 3.6 million euros. The aim of the research projects is to develop therapies against two rare diseases in children.

In 2012, a Fraunhofer project group for Translational Medicine and Pharmacol-ogy TMP was established at the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME in association with the LOEWE program (Hessian Initiative for the Development of Scientific-Economic Excellence). The aim of this group was to expand the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft’s portfolio in the field of drug re-search and development. Over the last number of years, the former Fraunhofer project group TMP has achieved international recognition in the area of im-mune disorders due to its extensive expertise in areas such as drug identifica-tion, pharmaceutical technology, highly differentiated and indication-specific pharmacological models, and clinical research. As a result of these advances, the TMP branch of Fraunhofer IME is set to become an independent institute with headquarters in Frankfurt am Main and locations in Hamburg and Göttingen as of January 1, 2021.

Scientists at Fraunhofer IME published “Guidelines on Target Assessment for Innovative Therapeutics” developed in the BMBF-funded GOT-IT project, which should facilitate more efficient translational research at universities and promote the transition to industry.

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.

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.