Full proposal for a Cluster of Excellence for drug research has been submitted

The summer holidays were short for a number of researchers at Saarland University and the participating research institutes. Up until the submission deadline on 22 August, they were working on the wording for the full proposal for a Cluster of Excellence on the topic of ‘nextAID³ - Next Generation of Cl-driven Drug Discovery and Development’. It will not be announced until May 2025 which Clusters of Excellence will be funded in future.

The ‘nextAID³’ cluster in the NanoBioMed research centre at Saarland University is planning new and innovative approaches to AI-driven drug research. The interdisciplinary research team is led by Professors Anna Hirsch, Martina Sester and Andrea Volkamer. Spokesperson Anna Hirsch summarised the application in the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper on 26 August as follows: ‘There are many fields of research that are neglected by the pharmaceutical industry: diseases that affect the global South, for example, or antibiotics research. Companies also rarely carry out research with natural substances because molecules found in nature are often more complex than synthetic ones. We want to discover and develop active substances faster, using AI-based methods as well as other computer-aided approaches. AI is not just a buzzword for us, but actually integral to research.’

Background Excellence Strategy

At the beginning of February, the international panel of experts selected 41 out of 143 draft proposals that were allowed to submit a full proposal. These full proposals will now be reviewed in parallel with the renewal proposals of the 57 Clusters of Excellence that are due for renewal. On 22 May 2025, the German Research Foundation and the German Council of Science and Humanities will announce which Clusters of Excellence will be funded in the future. They can then begin their work on 1 January 2026. The German Research Foundation has outlined the exact timetable in this diagram.

The federal and state governments intend to provide a total of around 539 million euros annually for the Clusters of Excellence funding line from 2026. This will be used to fund up to 70 clusters of excellence for seven years, each of which will receive funding totalling between three and ten million euros per year.