The Institute of Infectious Diseases combines services, teaching and research under one roof and covers the entire breadth of microbiology.
Teaching
The Institute provides in training in clinical microbiology and the study of infectious diseases for university students from the disciplines of medicine, dentistry, pharmacy and cell biology.
The next public annual symposium of the Swiss Biorisk Alliance will focus on disease surveillance and control as well asvaccine development in the context of “One Health."
Research
The Santella project took second place in the Ypsomed Innovation Award 2025 competition. The award recognizes innovative and economically viable developments that combine science and market needs. With their concept, Olivier Schären, Sabrina Stöckli and Siegfried Hapfelmeier convinced the jury with their approach to developing a vaccine against avian pathogenic E. coli. Both the IFIK and the IVI are supporting the team in the development of the vaccine.
An interdisciplinary study, led by IFIK researcher Prof. Siegfried Hapfelmeier and Prof. Adrien Mestrot, Head of the Soil Science Unit at GIUB, as part of the Interfaculty Research Cooperation “One Health”, reveals that gut bacteria play a crucial role in converting arsenobetaine into toxic arsenic compounds. Results show that arsenobetaine, commonly found in seafood and previously considered harmless, is partly transformed into toxic arsenic compounds by the action of gut bacteria in the mammalian body. These findings raise new questions about the safety of seafood consumption.
The ancient proverb “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” long predates the discovery of antibiotics. Modern scientists recently found a way put this adage into practice when they found that peptides made by one lung-colonizing bacteria can act against another.
Janine Lux won the Alumni MedBern Research Award for her poster entitled "Interspecies peptide hijacks S. pneumoniae transporter to inhibit growth and colonization" on the Day of BioMedical Research in Bern. As this award recognizes collaborative research we are thankful to all collaborators contributing to the research presented. The research highlighted in the poster was recently published.
Finding strategies for decolonizing gut carriers of multidrug-resistant Escherichia coli bacteria is a public-health priority. In this context, novel approaches should be validated in preclinical in vivo gut colonization models before being translated to humans. However, the use of mice presents many limitations. In a recent work performed in the group of Prof. Dr. med. Endimiani, Zophobas morio larvae were used for the first time to design a new model of intestinal colonization. Their work demonstrated that the Z. morio model promises to be a feasible and high-throughput approach to study novel gut decolonization strategies against antibiotic-resistant Escherichia coli. This approach will reduce the number of subsequent confirmatory mammalian experiments in accordance to the 3R approach. This work was supported by the National Research Programme ‘Advancing 3R - Animals, Research and Society’ (NRP79) / Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) –grant No. 206400.
IFIK junior researcher Sabrina Stöckli has secured a BRIDGE Proof-of-Concept (PoC) Fellowship, receiving 130,000 CHF to advance intestinal vaccine research performed at Prof. Siegfried Hapfelmeier's laboratory for Gut Microbiology at the IFIK. As a Co-Founder of UniBe Spin-off "Santella," Sabrina will develop a novel vaccine targeting pathogenic E. coli in livestock. Sabrina is one of 11 recipients in the latest BRIDGE special call. The fellowship, part of the BRIDGE funding program by SNSF and Innosuisse, supports young researchers in refining business ideas from their research for market entry and business model validation.
Janine Lux won an award last week at the 16th European Meeting on the Molecular Biology of the Pneumococcus (Europneumo) in Crete for her oral presentation on "AmiA and AliA peptide ligands, found in Klebsiella pneumoniae, are imported into pneumococci and alter the transcriptome".
The spin-off Enzoxa won the 2023 Bernese start-up comption stage-up. Enzoxa outperforms over 60 other projects in this competition. Enzoxa is a joint venture between the IFIK and IPS consisting of team members: Léa Chèvre, Dr. Matheus Notter, Prof. Christelle Robert, Prof. Siegfried Hapfelmeier, Dr. Pierre Mateo, and Cindy Chen (from left to right). Read more about the stage-up competition in entrepreneurship-bern.ch
Olivier Schären is developing a novel vaccine against one of the world's most harmful poultry diseases with the startup Santella. He is one of four young researchers who are being supported in their leap into entrepreneurship as part of the Venture Fellowship Program of the Innovation Office of the University of Bern.
Congratulations to Simone Leoni The poster of an improved ex vivo model of tick-borne encephalitis has been successfully accepted for the ECCMID23 congress!
Microbial resistance development towards current antibiotics is alarming. New solutions to treat infectious diseases are urgently needed. IFIK Researchers Dr. Matheus Notter, Prof. Siegfried Hapfelmeier, and IPS Researcher Prof. Christelle Robert form the core team of the spin-off project “ENZOXA." The aim is to harness the natural antimicrobial power of plants and develop novel treatments against the stomach pathogen Helicobacter pylori. Read the interview of UniBe Venture Fellow Dr. Notter in UNIAKTUELL.
For the first time, the University of Bern has awarded four "UniBE Venture Fellowships" to support entrepreneurial young researchers and their promising innovation projects: two are dedicated to combating antibiotic resistance, one to liver disease therapy and the fourth to improved psychotherapies.
Excerpt from the program "Quinta dimensione. Il futuro è già qui" of the Italian state television RAI with film footage shot in the sitem-insel building. In the feature, Dr. Kathrin Summermatter, head of the Biosafety Center of the Institute for Infectious Diseases (IFIK), comments on corona research in high-security laboratories. The whole program is available in the RAI 3 player (registration required).
University
Service
Sie finden darin unter anderem Informationen wie eine infektiöse Probe verpackt und transportiert werden muss, wer diese analysieren kann, welche gesetzlichen Bestimmungen es gibt und welche Institutionen weiterhelfen können. Alle darin enthaltenen Daten sind öffentlich zugängliche Informationen. Falls Sie weitere Daten zur Verfügung stellen möchten, oder Änderungswünsche und Korrekturen haben, so bitten wir Sie dies uns unter der E-Mail Adresse info@biorisk.ch zu melden. Dann nehmen wir die Anpassungen gerne vor.
January 29, 2020
17:00
Event
November 16, 2019
Education
Studies
by researchers at the Ifik
Friedbühlstrasse 25 Postfach 3001 Bern
Phone: + 41 31 684 18 00
