(Vienna, 24 March 2025) At this year's Austrian Infection Congress in Saalfelden, Katja Knapp from the Department of Dermatology was awarded the Austrian Infection Prize. The prize of the Austrian Society for Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine is awarded to first authors of basic and clinically oriented scientific work in the field of infectious diseases.
Katja Knapp received the award for the study "Combination of compound screening with an animal model identifies pentamidine to prevent Chlamydia trachomatis infection", which she published in July 2020 as first author together with a research team led by principal investigator Georg Stary (MedUni Vienna's Department of Dermatology) in the journal "Cell Reports Medicine". As part of this research, the active ingredient pentamidine was identified as a promising candidate for the prophylaxis of chlamydial infections and possibly other bacterial sexually transmitted diseases. The significance of these study results should be seen in the context of the sharp increase in sexually transmitted diseases in recent years and the continued lack of a vaccine against common bacterial pathogens such as chlamydia.
About the person:
Katja Knapp studied molecular medicine at the Medical University of Innsbruck, where she graduated in 2019. For her master's thesis, she conducted research in the laboratory of Prof. Andreas Villunger on the function of polyploidy in the development of hepatocellular carcinoma. During her studies, she realised that she wanted to continue working on a translational project. She started her doctoral studies in 2019 in the research group of Prof. Georg Stary at the Department of Dermatology of the Medical University of Vienna and is also in the CeMM PhD programme. She is also active in the Next Generation Immunologists (NGI), the young immunologists of the ÖGAI (Austrian Society for Allergology and Immunology) and was NGI president from 2022-2025. She is currently investigating how the local immune system in the female genital tract coordinates immunity and tolerance during infection with Chlamydia trachomatis and is also trying to find new ways to prevent chlamydia infections in the future. Since February, she has been working on an FFG-funded project to develop drug formulations with pentamidine for application in the genital tract.