National Doctoral Programme in
Informational and Structural Biology

We are developing a novel research direction - medical systems virology. Our aim is to concert structural biology, virology, cell biology and classical biochemical approaches with bioinformatics and modern high-throughoutput techniques to address common features of the virus-host interaction and to use this knowledge for the development of new antiviral agents. We believe that the key factor for the success of the multidisciplinary approach chosen is cooperation with experts in the graduate school.

Our model organism is influenza A virus, and our favorite cellular antiviral targets are vacuolar-ATPase and translation factors. We investigate the possibility to utilize the dependency of influenza A viruses on these basic cellular factors for drug discovery. We are interested also in other viruses that utilize the same cellular complexes for efficient replication to demonstrate a broad-spectrum antiviral activity of discovered agents.