Publications by authors named "F X Heinz"

Mucus is a complex biological hydrogel that acts as a barrier for almost everything entering or exiting the body. It is therefore of emerging interest for biomedical and pharmaceutical applications. Besides water, the most abundant components are the large and densely glycosylated mucins, glycoproteins of up to 20 MDa and carbohydrate content of up to 80 wt%.

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Biocompatible and functionalizable hydrogels have a wide range of (potential) medicinal applications. The hydrogelation process, particularly for systems with very low polymer weight percentages (<1 wt %), remains poorly understood, making it challenging to predict the self-assembly of a given molecular building block into a hydrogel. This severely hinders the rational design of self-assembled hydrogels.

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Arthropod-borne flaviviruses include a number of medically relevant human pathogens such as the mosquito-borne dengue (DEN), Zika, and yellow fever (YF) viruses as well as tick-borne encephalitis virus (TBEV). All flaviviruses are antigenically related and anamnestic responses due to prior immunity can modulate antibody specificities in subsequent infections or vaccinations. In our study, we analyzed the induction of broadly flavivirus cross-reactive antibodies in tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) and DEN patients without or with prior flavivirus exposure through TBE and/or YF vaccination, and determined the contribution of these antibodies to TBE and dengue virus (DENV) neutralization.

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Enzyme-catalyzed late-stage functionalization (LSF), such as methylation of drug molecules and lead structures, enables direct access to more potent active pharmaceutical ingredients (API). S-adenosyl-l-methionine-dependent methyltransferases (MTs) can play a key role in the development of new APIs, as they catalyze the chemo- and regioselective methylation of O-, N-, S- and C-atoms, being superior to traditional chemical routes. To identify suitable MTs, we developed a continuous fluorescence-based, high-throughput assay for SAM-dependent methyltransferases, which facilitates screening using E.

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Before the advent of a vaccine, infections with tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) virus in Austria led to the hospitalization of several hundred and, due to underreporting, possibly more than thousand patients with severe neurological disease every year. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this country had the highest recorded morbidity of TBE in Europe, but similar endemic risk areas exist in many other European countries as well as Central and Eastern Asia. In this article, I describe my personal recollections of the development of a highly purified TBE vaccine in the late 1970s, to which I contributed as a young post-doctoral scientist mentored by Christian Kunz (then director of the Institute of Virology at the Medical Faculty, University of Vienna) in a collaboration with the Austrian biopharmaceutical company Immuno.

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