The Fraunhofer-Institut für Biomedizinische Technik (IBMT) works primarily as a technology developer and device manufacturer for customers from all over the world. As a founding member of the Life Sciences Group of the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, which now comprises six institutes and one research institution, the Fraunhofer IBMT cooperates closely with its industrial customers as well as public and private customers in the areas of biomedical and medical engineering, molecular and cellular biotechnology and biohybrid technology, cryobiotechnology and nanobio technology, ultrasound technologies, as well as medical sensor technology, biomedical informatics and eHealth.
Participating Entities and Major Infrastructure
The main department Medical Biotechnology focuses on innovative cell-culture systems and testing methods for different fields (e.g. stem cell research, nanotechnology and biological barriers). In addition, future-oriented platforms are developed for collecting, preparing, preserving and distributing of bioreagents and clinical samples for worldwide networks. In this context, the main department operates a range of different important cryobanks such as the Global HIV Vaccine Research Cryoprepository (GHRC) funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the mirror facility of the European Bank for Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (EBiSC), the German Environmental Specimen Bank (ESB); the largest existing studies on the exposure to pollution of the population in Germany) and the German-African network project for research in Staphylococcus aureus entiltled “Infection Biology and Epidemiology of Staphylococci and Staphylococcal Diseases in sub-Saharan Africa”, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).
The group Health Information Systems provides innovative ICT infrastructures for eHealth, telemedicine, biobanking and clinical cancer research. IBMT’s group Health Information Systems has a well-known expertise in developing advanced ICT solutions for eHealth, personal health systems, smart disease management, decision support, telemedicine, semantic biomedical data integration, clinical cancer research, and for cryo biobanking. The unit contributes central IT components to several large EU funded IT projects on personalized medicine, on the re-usage of primary healthcare data for clinical research and predictive modelling, on chronic disease management and decision support and on semantic medical information retrieval. The Health Information Systems group also coordinates the H2020 project iManageCancer that provides a mobile platform for patient empowerment and self-management in the cancer domain. In addition, the unit leads the national project XplOit that will provide a platform for clinical data sharing and predictive research with the aim to support the development, validation and usage of predictive models in systems medicine.
