In the years 2009 to 2012, the German Ministry for Education and Research set up the German Centers Health Researc (DZG). The central task of these 6 centers is to create optimal research conditions for the control of common diseases, e.g. Diabetes, infections and lung diseases.

At more than 80 locations, doctors and scientists in more than one hundred universities, university hospitals and non-university research centers work together in interdisciplinary teams. Within the individual DZGs structures such as biobanks, data management systems and promotion of young talents are in place in order to bring new medical research results into application more quickly. With this goal in mind, the research activities of the DZGs should complement each other in the future. With a networking of the DZGs, not only within the respective centers, but also with the other centers and additional university and non-university partners, this should work even better.

Strategies are being developed in DZG-wide steering committees in order to promote this networking. The German Center for Lung Research (DZL) is represented by two employees from the Hanoverian location, BREATH, in these newly founded committees. Dr. Bettina Wiegmann, working group leader of the ex-vivo organ perfusion from the Clinic for Cardiac, Thoracic, Transplantation and Vascular Surgery (HTTG) of the MHH, has been appointed to the DZG Steering Committee Prevention. Dr. Annegret Zurawski, Managing Director of BREATH, will be involved the steering committee Public Relations. Dr. Wiegmann says: "The DZGs have a wealth of experience from which we benefit together to develop best-practice approaches for improved prevention and diagnosis."
 

Text: BREATH / CD

Picture: MHH / Kaiser