Discovery of a druggable pocket in SARS-CoV-2 Spike: New avenue to defeat COVID-19?

Imre Berger was trained as a biochemist at Leibniz University and Medical School (MHH) in Hannover (Germany), MIT (Cambridge, USA), and ETH Zurich (Switzerland). He researches essential proteins complexes in human health and disease, creates synthetic vaccines and develops enabling technologies for this purpose. After Group Leader posts at ETH (2005) and EMBL (2007), Imre was appointed Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry at the University of Bristol (2014). In 2017, he became Director of the Bristol Synthetic Biology Centre and Co-Director of the Bristol Biodesign Institute BBI, Since 2019, Imre is Founding and Managing Director of the Max Planck Bristol Centre for Minimal Biology. Imre Berger has pioneered synthetic viral nanosystems for DNA delivery and complex biologics production. The tools he developed are accelerating research and development in academia and industry world-wide. He holds international patents for protein and DNA technologies, published more than 130 papers in leading periodicals, co-founded three biotech companies and received numerous distinctions, including the Swiss Technology Award, the W.A. DeVigier Foundation Award and the Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award for his innovative research. Sicne 2019, Imre is Investigator of the European Research Council ERC.