Since 2016, the Mannheim University of Applied Sciences has been one of the ten universities for applied sciences to receive an outstanding research excellence award from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for its M2Aind " Multimodal Analytics and Intelligent Sensorics for the Healthcare Industry" University of Applied Sciences Impulse Partnership in Innovation. The university was able to assert itself against stiff competition and obtain funding from Berlin, initially amounting to € 5 million, and an additional € 1.3 million from industry.

Now three partners of the innovation partnership from the impulse project "SM²all - Low Molecular Active Ingredients" are among the winners of the nationwide "Biotechnology - Learning from Nature  Contest for Ideas"; they convinced the panel of external experts with their three submitted project proposals. With this contest, the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science and Arts intends to promote research approaches that are characterised by new and original strategies with a high scientific-technical risk of development and failure, that cannot be classified as either pure basic research nor as market-oriented research.

Each of the contest winners will receive initial funding of up to €60,000 to carry out a nine-month feasibility study. The most promising ideas then have the chance to receive additional funding for 3 years totaling five times the original amount in a second funding phase.

"We are very pleased about this triple award," says Prof. Dr. Thorsten Röder, project manager at SM²all, who together with Prof. Philipp Weller was given the opportunity to prepare a feasibility study by the middle of this year. "These grants underline once more the competitiveness and creative potential of our partnership for innovation," emphasizes Prof. Dr. Carsten Hopf, partnership spokesman for M²Aind and head of the CeMOS Center of Excellence at Mannheim University of Applied Sciences. In the future, the CeMOS Center of Excellence will develop new microarray evaluation techniques in the other two funded projects together with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in order to advance this key technology in the areas efficiency, automation and cost reduction.

The aim of the SM²all impulse project is to modernise the entire process chain of drug production for small molecules and biopharmaceuticals. The main objective is to produce active substances in a continuously secured process and to test their function by means of an innovative combination of automation technology and online analysis in order to increase patient safety and reduce manufacturing costs.