Georg Winter announced as AITHYRA’s deputy director for biomedicine

13 Mar'25

Biochemist Georg Winter will take over the biomedical institute management of AITHYRA from April 2025. Winter was selected as the best candidate in a highly competitive process.

The development of AITHYRA is continuing apace. The research institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in biomedicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), which was founded on the initiative of the non-profit Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation (BIS) in Mainz, is being strengthened: biochemist Georg Winter will take over the biomedical directorate of AITHYRA from April 2025.

Winter previously worked as a group leader at CeMM - Research Center for Molecular Medicine, also an institute of the ÖAW. Before this, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School in the USA. Winter’s studies have advanced promising strategies for the development of new cancer drugs. Winter is the founder of several companies; his discoveries, for example, underly the establishment of Proxygen, one of the first companies in the Startup Labs at the Vienna BioCenter.

Georg Winter says: “I am very much looking forward to the new task and the collaboration with Michael Bronstein. Our common goal is to accelerate the acquisition of scientific knowledge and to answer fundamental questions in the life sciences by integrating biomedical research and AI. In this way, we want to develop completely new treatment methods for cancer and other life-threatening diseases.”

AITHYRA is the first institute of its kind in Austria and Europe. It will achieve revolutionary advances in biomedicine through the development of AI-supported research approaches. As a specialist in chemical biology, Winter is working on methods to change the function of proteins using chemical agents. This approach has enabled him, for example, to modulate cellular degradation systems in such a way that pathogenic proteins are specifically degraded. With the help of AI, AITHYRA plans to automate the design process for active substances, among other things, in order to be able to program many other biological processes. The aim is to understand how proteins can communicate with each other and how diseases arise from faulty communication between proteins.

With the founding of AITHYRA last September, the Austrian Academy of Sciences further expanded its life science focus. The Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation is funding the institute with 150 million euros, the largest private research grant ever received in Austria. In February 2025, AITHYRA moved into its first laboratory and office space in the Marxbox at the Vienna BioCenter. In cooperation with the Vienna Business Agency, a new, jointly developed research building will be developed by 2029.