Primary Focus 1
- Studies on preclinical prophylactic vaccines against various human pathogenic viral agents (HIV, RSV, Orthopox, HPV).
- Studies on pathogenesis and pre-exposure prophylaxis are conducted by means of the AIDS macaque model.
Primary Focus 2
- Standardizing animal experiments with the help of prognostic markers (z.B. Tetherin, Apobec, TLR7, MHC)
- Development of in vitro replacement methods for experiments with non-human primates
- Determination of viral load
- Immune genetics
Primary Focus 3
Prion diseases
- Embedded in an international consortium we are conducting a study to assess the risk for humans to be infected with chronic wasting disease (CWD), a prion disease that affects North American cervids.
- We have recently established an in vitro system (RT-QuiC) that can diagnose prion-infectious specimen with high sensitivity and specificity.
- The RT- QuiC system will be used to estimate the general transmissibility of prion infections in cynomolgus macaques.