Georg Winter

Georg Winter is a biochemist at CeMM – Research Center for Molecular Medicine.

ERC Starting Grant

Project title: Therapeutic hijacking of E3 Ligases
Duration: 2020-2024

With his ERC Starting Grant, Georg Winter wants to fill a gap in cancer treatment. He is pursuing a new approach to drug design: conventional drugs try to block harmful proteins with a complementary agent. But that only works about 20% of the time. Winter, on the other hand, wants to take advantage of the cell's own recycling machinery. Disease-causing proteins are not only blocked, but completely degraded. The central challenge here is to identify suitable "molecular glues" that make it possible to specifically label the harmful proteins. By binding to so-called E3 ubiquitin ligases, they can then be degraded by the cell.

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