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. Dr. Gisa Gerold
- Univ.-Prof. Heribert Stoiber
- Dr. Janine Kimpel
- Dr. Zoltan Banki