“Our Existing Basic Research Provides a Solid Starting Point for Further Work”

Preventing the coronavirus from binding to host cells and fusing with them, and thus from spreading through the body, is the focus of current research by the structural biochemists at Jülich’s Institute of Biological Information Processing (IBI). More precisely, they are developing a ligand – a specific binding molecule – that displaces a certain binding protein of the virus from the receptor of the host cell. An interview with Prof. Dieter Willbold, the director of the institute.