The Network University Medicine (NUM) was founded four years ago as part of the crisis management against the COVID-19 pandemic in order to coordinate clinical COVID-19 research throughout university medicine. The idea: wherever joint action and a coordinated approach brings synergies, speed or other advantages, the NUM is intended to promote cooperation between clinical researchers. Accordingly, the NUM's research projects are clinically oriented and strive for directly practice-relevant findings in order to provide better care for patients or better manage major crises in the field of public health.
Since then, the NUM has significantly changed the way German university medicine collaborates in clinical research. For the first time, scientists from all 36 German university medical centers are working together in an overarching platform in interdisciplinary research projects. This comprehensive approach, which covers the entire university medical center and all medical disciplines, distinguishes the NUM from other clinical research networks. These are generally focused on individual disease areas and sub-areas of university medicine.
A characteristic feature of all NUM projects is that university medicine acts jointly across locations, not in competition. The principle of "cooperation instead of competition". The network has established research infrastructures for this purpose.
NUM research infrastructures support researchers with methodological expertise, data management and high-quality research data. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a widespread lack of the necessary platforms to collect, store and make available treatment data and biosamples for use across institutions in a structured manner. For this reason, research and data infrastructures were either set up from scratch in several NUM projects (e.g. the RACOON image data platform) or existing ones were expanded (e.g. the NUKLEUS study platform).
The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is funding the University Medicine Network from 1 July 2025 in a third funding phase - NUM 3.0 - over the next five years. Despite the current difficult budgetary situation, the BMBF is thus ensuring the continued operation of the nationwide, interdisciplinary network, to which all 37 university hospitals have joined. The research infrastructures established in the NUM enable a cooperative collaboration that did not previously exist in this form in Germany. The joint collection and utilisation of medical research data from all 37 university hospitals is a milestone for clinical research in Germany, which ultimately benefits patients. The new funding enables the NUM to consistently pursue its strategic goals by creating a nationwide study and data space for clinical research and optimising the clinical research landscape for future pandemics and major health crises. The basis for this are highly qualified employees at all locations.
The Marburg site is involved with the following infrastructures / projects:
AKTIN@NUM - operation of the AKTIN infrastructure and the emergency admission register
How many patients come to the emergency department every day? How urgently do they need to be treated and with what complaints did they visit the emergency department? Unfortunately, this data is not yet available across the board in Germany. With the AKTIN emergency admission register, which is the result of a joint research project between Magdeburg University Hospital and the Institute for Medical Informatics at RWTH Aachen University Hospital, this information can now be recorded and made available in a decentralised manner in the participating hospitals Your contact at the Marburg site Dr. Andreas Jerrentrup
Lokale Stabsstelle (LokS)
As local hubs, the LokS perform important administrative, coordinating and communicative tasks at the location in close coordination and cooperation with the NUM coordination centre. They act as staff units close to the Executive Board. Your contact at the Marburg site Prof. Dr. Harald Renz
NUM-DIZ - Network of Data Integration Centres of University Medicine –
In a world in which medicine is benefiting from digital progress and ever-increasing amounts of data are being generated, routine data from medical care must be accessed efficiently, securely and in a way that promotes innovation, made available for medical research and used to answer medical questions. The NUM-DIZ project builds on the preliminary work of the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII), within which data integration centres (DIZ) have been established at most German university hospitals with the aim of supporting data provision and cross-site data integration and analysis. Your contact at the Marburg site Christian Seidemann
NUM - Resilience - Infrastructure
In order to ensure the resilience of university medical research in the event of a crisis, four primary fields of action were identified in which the functions of the NUMresilience infrastructure can be located. The ‘Monitoring and Surveillance’ field of action is represented by a Monitoring and Surveillance Unit (MuSe) and a Pathogen Expertise Platform (PakoP).
The overarching goal of the MuSe as a core functionality is the continuous improvement of the mapping of control-relevant parameters from infection surveillance, including risk factor analysis Your contact at the Marburg site Prof. Dr. Max Geraedts
PakoP represents a pathogen-related specialist authority that anticipates pandemics and maintains capacities to be activated in the event of a pandemic in order to enable a rapid, agile and (pathogen-) specific pandemic defence. Your contact at the Marburg site Prof. Dr. Stephan Becker
RACOON - The radiology co-operation in the NUM
RACOON successfully provides the research infrastructure for medical image-based research. It is designed as a national research platform that provides and maintains a complete ecosystem for modern image-based medical research projects. Your contact at the Marburg site Prof. Dr. Andreas Mahnken
