Advances in biomedical sciences, technologies and systems approaches have created powerful tools that enable a more holistic picture of a disease state and provide better tailored treatments to a large number of patients.

Despite these achievements, significant global health challenges remain, and the current pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 bears bitter witness to the vulnerability of health care systems. Among the most critical unresolved medical challenges are infectious and inflammatory diseases, with complex overarching patterns in the human body, which are not well understood and create not only a significant scientific gap, but also result in a huge number of therapy failures and thus patients´ lives.

Recent successes in using mRNA- based delivery methods, the dawn of a new era for proximity-inducing technologies, as well as use of advances in computational and nanotechnology applications provide toolboxes for basic research and at the same time novel opportunities for tackling unresolved medical needs.

Research and development into these scientific approaches at Goethe University Frankfurt and Gutenberg University Mainz have reached a critical stage that makes it ideal to complementarily combine our efforts in a joint initiative named EMTHERA - Emerging Therapeutics.

This research cluster will bring together interdisciplinary basic and clinical scientists to break frontiers by

(i) understanding common/unique causes for infectious and inflammation- and immunity-based disease development,

(ii) defining appropriate therapeutic targets,

(iii) utilizing novel tools to study and develop emerging strategies and new classes of therapeutics for infection, inflammation and impaired immune mechanisms.