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Researchers at D-BSSE and colleagues have analysed the bird flu epidemic caused by the H7N9 strain that affected China from 2013 to 2017. New phylogenetic trees will help to improve monitoring of future bird flu epidemics.

Whilst facing extraordinary challenges at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Swiss SARS-CoV-2 sequencing consortium (S3C) was established at D-BSSE. With over 76’000 SARS-CoV-2 genomes sequenced between 2020 and the end of 2022 and made available in open-data archives, the effort led by Tanja Stadler informed science-based decision making – and will facilitate pathogen surveillance in the times to come.

rETHink, the organisational development project at ETH Zurich, was launched in 2020. Three years later, on 23 March at the rETHink Switch event, ETH Zurich celebrated the conclusion of interpretation phase and kicked off the next phase that focuses on the implementation of the recommendations, initiatives, improvements. Interview with Roland Baumann, responsible for rETHink communications and core team member of Workstream 6 focussing on cultural development.

On 18 April, 5 PM, two D-​BSSE alumni will share their inspirational biographies with us and respond to questions on career choices, lessons learned, pitfalls and opportunities you must grasp: Software engineer Oliver Hilsenbeck and principal investigator Sonja Billerbeck. As usual: for D-​BSSE community members only!

“Enhancing bispecific antibody therapies with healthy donor T-cells”: This groundbreaking work of Systems Immunology Lab head Sai Reddy and his team members Edo Kapetanovic, Rodrigo Vazquez-Lombardi and Cédric Weber had been nominated for the 2022 Spark Award. ETH Zurich gives this award to the most promising inventions that were filed as patents during the previous year. Reddy is a serial entrepreneur at D-BSSE.