Saarbrücken, 25 June 2020 - Prof Anna K. H. Hirsch recently received a prestigious European grant with a total funding volume of 3.2 million euros to initiate an Innovative Training Network (ITN) in the framework of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions. Hirsch leads the department Drug Design and Optimization at the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS) in Saarbrücken, a site of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) on the campus of the Saarland University.
Antimicrobial resistance is a serious global health problem and, at present, there is no collaborative inter-institutional and highly interdisciplinary training network explicitly focused on the discovery and development of novel anti-infective agents. In order to achieve this ambitious goal, a group of leading scientists from academia and industry from a range of European countries (Germany, France, Switzerland, Norway, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Belgium) has the mission to train the next generation of scientists (twelve PhD students) with cutting-edge interdisciplinary skills in the discovery of new anti-infective agents.
The ITN entitled “Exploiting the methylerythritol phosphate pathway as a source of drug targets for novel anti-infectives” is a network comprising eleven academic and six non-academic partners. The next generation of scientists will be trained for three years in an interdisciplinary and intersectorial environment going beyond the state-of-the-art in the anti-infective field by tackling the attractive and underexplored enzymes from the 2C-methyl-D-erythritol 4-phosphate (MEP) pathway. Anna K. H. Hirsch will coordinate the new network.
Further information you can find here.
