Prof. Kai Hilpert

Kai Hilpert is an Associate Professor (Reader) of Infection and Immunity at the Institute of Infection and Immunity at St. George’s University of London. He studied Biochemistry at the Humboldt University of Berlin and undertook his Ph.D. at the Institute of Biochemistry at the Charité at Berlin. He has 25 years of experience in the synthesis of peptide libraries, screening, and optimization of peptides. Since 2003, he has studied the design and optimization of short antimicrobial peptides. He was the first researcher to apply peptide libraries synthesized on cellulose membranes to investigate antimicrobial peptides (AMPs). Combining his expertise with bioinformatics, he and his collaborators have optimized the prediction of short AMPs, and their best library showed a success rate of 98% (several publications). In addition, he showed that tethered AMPs can be used to protect implants from bacterial infections, stimulating research and development. In addition, he is co-author of the article "Alternatives to antibiotics—a pipeline portfolio review " published in Lancet Infectious Diseases, which won the Elsevier Atlas award. He works closely with the industry and is the founder and director of a university spin-off company TiKa Diagnostics Ltd. that exploits synthetic peptides developed in his laboratory. In recent years, he has intensively worked on product development, production of TiKa peptides, and quality management for TiKa products.