Highlights / Neuigkeiten / Publikationen
Herr Dr. Tizian Griesser aus der FG Sander wurde mit dem Swiss TB Award 2026 ausgezeichnet, einer jährlich verliehenen Ehrung der Schweizerischen Stiftung für Tuberkulose-Forschung für herausragende Beiträge in der TB-Forschung.
Prämiert wurde seine Publikation „Selective inhibition of Mycobacterium tuberculosis GpsI unveils a novel strategy to target the RNA metabolism“, die im Rahmen des Tuberkulose-Symposiums der Lungenliga Schweiz vorgestellt und gewürdigt wurde.
Die Arbeit identifiziert erstmals einen spezifischen Inhibitor des essenziellen RNA-abbauenden Enzyms GpsI, ein bislang schwer zugängliches, aber vielversprechendes Ziel im bakteriellen RNA-Stoffwechsel. Der Wirkstoff, entdeckt aus einer umfassenden chemischen Bibliothek, zeigt Aktivität im mikromolaren Bereich und eröffnet eine völlig neue Strategie zur Bekämpfung von M. tuberculosis. Diese Entdeckung liefert eine wichtige Grundlage für die Entwicklung neuer Therapeutika gegen resistente Tuberkulosestämme.
Der Swiss TB Award ist mit CHF 10’000 dotiert und wird seit 2002 jährlich vergeben. Er würdigt Forschungsarbeiten, die überwiegend in der Schweiz durchgeführt wurden und einen relevanten Beitrag zur Tuberkulosebekämpfung leisten.
Wir gratulieren zu diesem tollen Erfolg.
Frau Dr. Camille Jana Schmid aus der FG Hilbi hat erfolgreich ihre Dissertation (PhD) mit dem Titel „Legionella pneumophila - A Sleeping Beauty? Characterization of Heat-Induced Viable but Non-Culturable Legionella pneumophila and the Role of Ribosome Hibernation for Survival and Virulence" verteidigt.
Herr Dr. Fabian Ackle aus der FG Seeger hat erfolgreich seine Dissertation (PhD) mit dem Titel „Highly Parallelized Trafficking Analysis of KDEL Receptor Variants Using Flycode-MS" verteidigt.
Wir gratulieren zu diesen tollen Erfolgen.
We are very pleased to share that Dr. Michaela Procházková, currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, has also successfully secured a prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowship together with the Weiss research group.
As part of this fellowship, Dr. Procházková will join the Institute of Medical Microbiology (IMM) for a period of two years, where she will conduct her research within the Weiss group. During this time, she will focus on biofilms formed by Staphylococcus aureus, contributing her expertise to ongoing efforts in this important field of medical microbiology.
We warmly congratulate Dr. Procházková and the Weiss group on this achievement and look forward to the next two years of scientific exchange and progress at the IMM.
At the same time, we are happy to share that Dr. Alejandro Guerrero-López has been selected for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowship with the project OUTBRAID (OUTBreak AI-driven Detection: Enhancing MALDI-TOF outbreak detection with multimodal AI integrating epidemiological and genomic data), hosted at the Institute of Medical Microbiology, UZH, under the supervision of Prof. Adrian Egli. The proposal received a total evaluation score of 97/100.
OUTBRAID will develop (i) synthetic MALDI-TOF generation to improve robustness under domain shift and (ii) multimodal representation learning to support high-resolution outbreak clustering, benchmarking against genomic ground truth (ST/cgMLST/SNP).
The MSCA PF 2025 call was highly competitive: 17,066 applications were received (16,836 eligible), and 1,610 projects were selected (9.6% success rate).
The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships are highly competitive and support outstanding researchers in advancing their scientific careers through international mobility and collaboration. Being awarded such a grant requires an excellent project idea, a strong track record, and careful preparation. We are therefore genuinely happy to see their achievements recognized in this way and to count them among our colleagues at the IMM.
PD Dr. Helena Seth-Smith has received further funding from the University of Zurich to extend her genome enrichment research in the direction of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. As a critically important pathogen, and slow growing bacterium, this is a key opportunity to be able to gain genomic data rapidly, which can translate into drug resistance predication and inform patient treatment. We are very excited to broaden our portfolio of pathogens, and to be able to work more closely with the NZM.
Ms. Elisa Sosa has been awarded an SNF Mobility within Projects grant (formerly SNF Doc.Mobility) and a SEMP grant (formerly Erasmus). The funding will support a 6.5-month research stay in the laboratory of Dr. Gerry Tonkin-Hill at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and the Peter Doherty Institute, University of Melbourne. The research stay will focus on the analysis of genomic data, leveraging the host laboratory’s expertise in bioinformatics.
Frau Zoja Germuskova hat erfolgreich einen ESCMID Individual Research Grant eingeworben. Dies wird zur Untersuchung der Antibiotikaempfindlichkeit des zoonotischen Erregers Capnocytophaga canimorsus verwendet werden
Wir gratulieren herzlich zu diesen erfolgreichen Eingaben.