Charité is out to cure the incurable. With today’s opening of two new research centres in Wedding, it’s championing innovative cell and gene therapies that will be used to fight cancer, neurological diseases and diseases of the immune system.
These technologies of the future will be the target of research in two brand new institutes at the Virchow campus: the Berlin Centre for Advanced Therapies (BeCAT) and the ‘Simulated Human’ (Si-M) centre, a joint venture with the Technical University of Berlin. The first of these sites will see the research, production and clinical testing of biological drugs – living cells genetically modified to be compatible with patients and used, for example, to destroy cancer cells. The latter will be the site of advanced simulations of human biology, where researchers will aim to better understand disease mechanisms in order to find new approaches to curing them.
Patient-specific, cell-based gene therapies are considered the gateway to treating cancer, as they aim to actually cure the disease, not merely alleviate symptoms. A total of fourteen cleanrooms at the BeCAT centre will be the site of this oncological research of the future, some of which will be equipped with special cabinets where cleanliness is 100,000 times greater than on a typical city street.
These new research centres are not the end of Charité’s planned expansion into the field of genetic research. In 2028, the Berlin Centre for Gene and Cell Therapies is expected to open at Nordhafen – a joint project with Bayer AG and the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH), which will be closely linked to BeCAT.
