The CRC1279 congratulates the Creative Young Investigators Award Winners: Katharina Ernst, Mirja Harms, Dr. Yasser Ruiz-Blanco, Dr. Konstantin Sparrer and Dr. Stephanie Wehrstedt.

The Creative Young Investigators Award provides 10.000€ start-up funding to support innovative ideas of young researchers. PhD students as well as PostDocs were invited to submit project ideas related to the goals of CRC 1279 “Exploiting the Human Peptidome for Novel Antimicrobial and Anticancer Agents”. The award winners were selected by the Executive Board of CRC 1279 from a large number of applications received.  

In the past two years, this funding opportunity has supported highly diverse research topics. In 2018, Dr. Konstantin Sparrer and Stephanie Wehrstedt received the award to support their projects titled ‘Discovery of novel peptides that modulate anti-viral autophagy’ and ‘Screening of peptide libraries for endogenous peptides that promote lysosomal acidification and killing of intracellular Mycobacterium tuberculosis’ respectively. In 2019, the awarded projects focused on the discovery of novel peptides against whooping cough (Katharina Ernst), the identification of novel GPCR ligands in the human peptidome using an antibody‐based HTS approach (Mirja Harms) and the development of the PPB-Toolkit, a toolkit to profile peptidome bioactivity (Dr. Yasser Ruiz-Blanco).