SINERGIA grant for Frijlink

University of Groningen researcher Erik Frijlink (Pharmaceutical Technology and Biopharmacy), Fernando Stellacci (Polytechnical University of Lausanne), Caroline Tapparel Vu (University of Geneva) and Christian Münz (University of Zürich) have recently been awarded a Sinergia grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation for their project Novel virucidal drugs: from basic to in vivo studies. The project was granted 3.2M CHF (2.8M €), of which 800k CHF (700k €) will go to Frijlink’s group.

Viral diseases can best be prevented with vaccination, but recent outbreaks of emerging viruses and frequent influenza epidemics highlight that there is also an urgent need for effective drugs to treat these diseases. There are only a few antiviral drugs available and these are highly virus-specific and often not effective after mutation of the virus.

The Sinergia project will develop and test molecules that target a process present in all viruses and thus will be effective against a broad range of viruses instead of just one virus. For this a synergistic and multidisciplinary team has been assembled with expertise in material science, virology and drug formulation. If successful, this will be ground-breaking and pave the way to new generations of broad-spectrum antiviral drugs.