Berlin Institute of Health (BIH)

MAINTAINING HEALTH AND QUALITY OF LIFE, CREATING VALUE

The Berlin Institute of Health (BIH) has a social mission: to foster medical innovation and therefore improve patients’ health and quality of life. 

After bringing BIH’s foundational phase to a successful conclusion in the years 2013–2015 and establishing it as an independently operating corporation under public law from January 2016, the Executive Board was faced with the task of accelerating the rise to excellence of BIH and positioning it within the scientific landscapes. Against this background, the Executive Board has developed and decided upon a new ten-year-strategy, BIH Strategy 2026, to help shape global trends in medicine and research and to meet the challenges of biomedical research and the healthcare system of the 21st century.

The BIH Strategy 2026 sets out the overall goals and strategic priorities.

Vision

BIH aims to be pioneer for value-based, personalized medical care by performing translational research and innovation.

Mission

The BIH’s mission is maintaining or restoring the health and quality of life of people with progressive diseases by developing and using diagnostic tools and advanced therapies for unmet medical needs.

Research Goals

The goal of BIH’s research is to improve personalized outcome prediction in progressive diseases and to develop advanced therapies for personalized treatment.

Educational Goals

The educational goal is to support a new generation of translationally trained researchers in their scientific and clinical research with an integrative, translational and entrepreneurial approach.

Areas of Focus

BIH aims to provide research solutions enabling the transformation of medical care into a value-based model for the 21st century and focuses on

• Digitization: To be effective, translational and personalized medicine must be able to draw on digital clinical information systems and health records.
• Patient involvement: Shared responsibility for healthcare and health research must be encouraged to ensure patients are involved in disease prediction and therapies, and become engaged partners in research.
• Personalized medicine research: Healthcare resources must be concentrated into research on how bodily systems interact (systems medicine) to design personalized treatments.
• Advanced therapies: Technologies such as gene, cell and nanoscale therapies must be developed to tackle unmet needs in indiviudals.
• Innovation: Value-based healthcare systems require a cultural and behavioral shift among researchers, including improved technology transfer practices and entrepreneurial training.

The BIH Research Program: collaboration, integration, innovation

BIH's strategy will prioritize two key areas in progressive disease research: 

1. Personalized medicine for progressive diseases
2. Advanced therapies for progressive diseases

BIH’s four research platforms will be anchored by center-like units where innovative technologies, methods and research structures are developed to support the two core programs. They focus on digital medicine; clinical translational sciences; multiscale genomics; and humanized model systems and cell engineering. Each will build on or draw together existing facilities in the transational research commons and interact with additional structures of Charité and MDC. To further maximize impact, twin innovation drivers focused on technology transfer and training will run through all of these structures to remove translational barriers and foster a spirit of entrepreneurial research. 

BIH’s programs, platforms and innovation drivers make up the translational research commons of Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC):

BIH Translational Research Commons

In principle, we will seek for new groups/centers and existing groups/entities to join forces as research initiatives under a dynamic and flexible organizational and governance model. 

Innovation Drivers 

Innovation drivers support successful implementation of the programs and structures with central, overarching biomedical research concepts and activities.

Center for Transforming Biomedical Research and Biomedical Innovation Academy

With the Center for Transforming Biomedical Research and the Biomedical Innovation Academy the BIH strives to maximize the efficiency with which research results are translated into applications addressing priority healthcare needs, as well as to provide tailored education, catalyzing novel career paths responding to the challenges and promises of modern academic medicine. It will accomplish this through four pillars of activity, which will be overseen by an international advisory board consisting of leading experts in clinical translation, biomedical education, and meta-research:

• Research: BIH will conduct research on research (‘Meta-Research’) to identify opportunities for improving research practice, generate evidence for potential interventions, and develop metrics and policies that incentivize optimal research practices.
• Education and Training: BIH will develop innovative cross-disciplinary career paths open to the whole research community at different levels of professional qualification process; install tailored curricular education for different career paths at multi career levels adapted to current biomedical challenges.
• Services and Infrastructure: BIH will provide an integrative research data management environment, capturing the research process from study conception to data generation and dissemination; assist researchers in conducting research in accordance with the principles of open science.
• Public Outreach and Involvement in Research: BIH will engage in a dialogue with the public, including patients, care-givers, and patient advocacy.

Technology Transfer

The purpose of BIH's technology transfer unit will be to remove obstacles that exist in the research-to-clinical-practice pipeline. By joining the Charité’s technology transfer team we will establish “Berlin Health Innovations”, one-stop-shop to commercialize assets, closely aligned to the needs of healthcare industries. It will provide advice, funds and commercial know-how to researchers, eventually offering a network of internal and external advisers. 

The BIH technology transfer will be organized using a programmatic, holistic approach, supported by a functional governance framework and equipped with adequate resources. The central objective here is long-term, sustainable impact — in distinction or in addition to short-term “return on investment”.