CHARITE - UNIVERSITAETSMEDIZIN BERLIN

Their core work

Charité is one of Europe's largest university hospitals, combining clinical care with deep biomedical research across neuroscience, oncology, cardiovascular disease, and infectious diseases. They run large-scale clinical trials, develop computational brain models, and build data-sharing infrastructures for personalized medicine. Their research translates directly into patient care — from testing new drug candidates (e.g., placenta-derived cell therapies in PACE) to building remote monitoring systems for neurological disorders. They also serve as a major hub for EU-wide health data standardization and biobanking efforts.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

In the early H2020 period (2014–2018), Charité focused heavily on computational neuroscience — brain simulation, high-performance computing, neuroinformatics — alongside traditional clinical trials in cardiovascular disease and cancer, plus prenatal stress research. From 2019 onward, their portfolio shifted markedly toward personalized medicine, health data ecosystems (EOSC, biobanks, GDPR compliance), microbiome research, and drug repurposing. This reflects a broader institutional pivot from discipline-specific research toward data-driven, cross-disease translational medicine.

Charité is investing heavily in health data infrastructure and AI-driven personalized medicine, making them an increasingly attractive partner for projects requiring large-scale clinical data integration and GDPR-compliant analytics.

How they like to work

Charité operates primarily as an active partner (99 of 131 projects), bringing clinical expertise and patient cohorts to large consortia, but also demonstrates strong coordination capability with 32 led projects — particularly in neuroscience and developmental biology. With 1,247 unique partners across 61 countries, they function as a major European research hub with an exceptionally wide network, rather than relying on a small set of repeat collaborators. This makes them easy to integrate into new consortia and signals strong project management capacity.

Charité has collaborated with 1,247 distinct organizations across 61 countries, making it one of the most connected medical research institutions in H2020. Their network spans all of Europe with significant global reach into Africa, Asia, and the Americas through infectious disease and public health projects.

What sets them apart

Charité uniquely combines the scale of a 300-year-old top-tier university hospital (one of Europe's largest) with strong computational and data science capabilities — few clinical institutions can match both their patient cohort access and their expertise in brain simulation or health data platforms. Their coordination of both wet-lab clinical trials and dry-lab computational projects makes them a rare bridge between bedside medicine and digital health research. For consortium builders, they bring clinical validation capacity that pure research institutes cannot offer.

Highlights from their portfolio

• BrainModes
  Coordinated with EUR 1.87M budget — personalized whole brain simulations linking connectomics to dynamics, representing Charité's distinctive computational neuroscience strength.
• PACE
  Largest coordinated project at EUR 2.2M — a multicenter phase IIb clinical trial of placenta-derived stromal cells, demonstrating capacity to lead advanced therapy trials.
• HBP SGA1
  Part of the EUR 1B+ Human Brain Project flagship, contributing to mouse/human brain reconstruction, neuroinformatics, and high-performance computing simulation.