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Research on antiviral Therapies and Vaccines

There are three reasons why viruses are highly important for therapy research:

• First of all there are still many severe viral infections, for which there is no causal and effective treatment available yet.
• Second, viruses can be used as gen vehicles (viral vectors) for gene therapy and vaccination enabling treatment for many different hereditary and acquired diseases.
• Last, so called oncolytic viruses that replicate preferentially in Tumor cells represent promising new tools for anti-tumor therapy.

The Institute of Virology does active research in all these areas.

Next to the development of innovative conepts for anti-viral therapy, the field of virology faces currently one great challenge: the development of a vaccine against HIV/AIDS. So far, conventional strategies did not succeed in generating an effective reagent. Thus, we set out to apply a novel approach: we are trying to exploit mechanisms of the innate immune system to induce a more potent anti-viral immune response and/or construct modern recombinant RNA viruses for the development of a highly attenuated vaccine.

Research Groups / Work Groups:

• Univ.-Prof. Dorothee von Laer
• Univ.-Prof. Heribert Stoiber
• Dr. Janine Kimpel
• Dr. Zoltan Banki
• Dr. Guido Wollmann