From climate-neutral industry and new mobility solutions to global health research: Germany’s innovation clusters are developing the ideas that will shape our society tomorrow. At re:publica 2026, the cluster and campus initiatives of the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) will, for the first time, jointly showcase their success stories. The PROXIDRUGS Cluster, based at Goethe University Frankfurt, is developing innovative drugs that can selectively de

PROXIDRUGS scientist Xinlai Cheng and Cluster Speaker Ivan Đikić from Goethe University Frankfurt have received one of the prizes of the Innovation Award of the German BioRegions 2026 for their project “SpliceTACs: First-in-class spliceosome-targeting degraders.” The project had previously been selected as one of six finalists in this year’s competition and was presented on April 21, 2026, during the German Biotechnology Days in Leipzig to a high-level audience of investors,

The Clusters4Future PROXIDRUGS, curATime, and CNATM jointly invited participants to the conference “Therapeutic Frontiers in Medicine: Mechanisms and Modalities 2026” in Bad Homburg. The event was aimed at researchers, clinicians, and professionals from industry, placing a strong focus on current developments in translational medicine. Over a period of four days, more than 200 participants engaged in intensive exchange, including around 40 speakers. Discussions covered new th

As part of the ProxiUS program, funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space, PROXIDRUGS speaker Ivan Đikić visited the Molecular Therapeutics Initiative (MTI) at the University of California, Berkeley for scientific exchange and discussion. The visit highlighted the strong synergy between PROXIDRUGS and MTI. Bringing together complementary expertise and new perspectives, the exchange created valuable opportunities for knowledge transfer, education, and fu

As part of a political breakfast organized by the House of Pharma & Healthcare, representatives from academia, industry, and politics gathered for an exchange at the Department of Pharmacy of Goethe University Frankfurt. A special highlight of the program was an insight into the research activities of PROXIDRUGS. Project lead Maike Windbergs guided State Secretary Dr. Optendrenk through her laboratories and presented innovative approaches in drug delivery and human in vitro m

On February 11th, Kerstin Koch, project lead of the PROXIDRUGS project InnoDATA, joined a panel discussion at the closing event of the series “Die Farben der Biotechnologie” hosted by Technologieland Hessen. The event brought together experts from across the biotech landscape to discuss how innovation ecosystems and clusters can act as accelerators for scientific and technological progress. As part of the panel, PROXIDRUGS contributed the cluster perspective to the dialogue,

Scientists from Ivan Đikić lab at Goethe University Frankfurt and Radosław Nowak lab at the University of Bonn, within PROXIDRUGs network, invented ProxiCapture – an innovative affinity-proteomics platform that enables the systematic analysis of degrader-induced protein interactions directly in native cell and tissue samples. Molecular glue degraders are an emerging class of small molecules that can redirect cellular protein disposal systems to eliminate disease-relevant prot

On February 6, 2026, representatives from academia, clinic, industry, and politics met to an exchange meeting of the House of Pharma & Healthcare. The focus of the meeting was a structured overview of the activities of the House of Pharma & Healthcare as a platform for interdisciplinary exchange and knowledge transfer between universities, industry, and the public sector. The importance of Frankfurt as a hub for pharmaceutical research, education, and translation was particul

In a new publication in Angewandte Chemie PROXIDRUGS member Xinlai Cheng and researchers from Goethe University Frankfurt, Max Planck Institute of Biophysics and Ludwig Maximilian University Munich have reported an important advance in targeted protein degradation by developing a potent degraders (PROTACs) against the spliceosomal protein USP39. RNA splicing is essential for gene expression, and its dysregulation is strongly linked to cancer and neurodegenerative disorders.

In a new publication in Nature Communications, a team of PROXIDRUGS researchers at Goethe University Frankfurt, working within the InnoDATA project, reports the first comprehensive, data-driven classification of all human E3 ubiquitin ligases. The study presents a systematic map of the human “E3 ligome” and provides new insights into the functional relationships among E3 ligases. Using AI-supported computational analyses combined with experimental validation, the researcher