Wir überwinden Grenzen

Baden-Württemberg supports the Freiburg and Mannheim University Medical Center project on "Cross-border digital health innovations" (GdGI) as part of a Franco-German-Luxembourgish innovation partnership

Tapping into the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) for customized therapy recommendations and creating innovative platforms for the secure handling of sensitive health data: These are the goals of the project "Cross-border digital health innovations through data-based, AI-driven stratification of complex chronic diseases" (GdGI) of the Medical Center - University of Freiburg and the University Medical Center Mannheim as part of the international joint project CLINNOVA, which involves partners from Germany, France and Luxembourg. The state of Baden-Württemberg is funding the development of digital AI-supported healthcare solutions with a total of around 10 million euros until the end of 2023.

"Digital health data holds enormous potential for the tailored care of chronically ill people. Forward-looking projects such as the cross-state innovation partnership, which fits perfectly into the digitalization and healthcare strategy of the state of Baden-Württemberg, deserve our full support," says Theresia Bauer, Baden-Württemberg's Minister of Science, Research and the Arts.

Advancing personalized medicine across borders

"In order to drive forward tailored healthcare, researchers supported by artificial intelligence are analysing large amounts of patient data for selected model diseases and feeding the findings back into clinical care as tailored treatment recommendations," says Prof. Dr. Sergij Goerdt, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Heidelberg University, explaining the key role of artificial intelligence in personalized medicine. The GdGI project aims to enable the data-based prediction of disease progression and treatment success, particularly for complex chronic inflammatory diseases and advanced cancers. It also aims to improve the monitoring of infections in large cross-border regions.

The systematic integration of as much patient data as possible is crucial to the success of AI-supported healthcare. International cooperation is therefore of particular importance. "Research and patient care must not stop at national borders. We see the GdGI project as an important building block in our overarching transnational programs to advance quality-centered, personalized cutting-edge university medicine," emphasizes Prof. Dr. Frederik Wenz, Chief Medical Officer of the Medical Center - University of Freiburg. Together with its partner universities in the European University Alliance EPICUR and in the network of universities on the Upper Rhine "Eucor - The European Campus", the University of Freiburg is pursuing the further development of public health care in terms of personalized precision medicine. Heidelberg University is involved in the Heidelberg Mannheim Health & Life Science Alliance with its two Faculties of Medicine, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, the German Cancer Research Center, the Central Institute of Mental Health and the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research with the aim of improving patient care with innovative medical products, technologies and procedures. It is also a partner in the EPICUR university alliance.

Maximum protection for sensitive health data

A reliable, secure IT infrastructure is central to the collection, standardization and evaluation of medical data. "Anyone who uses personalized data in healthcare bears a special responsibility. Making this highly sensitive data quickly and securely usable for the benefit of patients is one of the core tasks of our project, which we are implementing according to the principles and structures of MIRACUM, the largest of the four consortia of the BMBF's Medical Informatics Initiative," says Prof. Dr. Dr. Melanie Börries, Director of the Institute of Medical Bioinformatics and Systems Medicine and head of the GdGI project at the Medical Center - University of Freiburg. The project manager at the University Medical Center Mannheim and one of the three coordinators on the German-French-Luxembourgish CLINNOVA steering committee, Prof. Dr. Oliver G. Opitz, Head of the Baden-Württemberg Telemedicine Coordination Office (KTBW), adds: "In view of the activities of major global players in the field of health data, there is an urgent need for concrete use cases for European solutions that can function in the GAIA-X context of a European, secure data architecture, for example, and focus on high ethical standards in data processing. We want to deliver these use cases with our combination of joint concrete disease programs and technology platforms."

New European standard

"Baden-Württemberg's participation in CLINNOVA is a decisive step in an outstanding multinational initiative together with the Luxembourg and French partners to advance a very ambitious project in healthcare. Our unique consortium will realize the vision of a new European standard - sovereign, open and interoperable - to exploit health data thanks to Artificial Intelligence for the benefit of all", explains Prof. Dr. Benoît Gallix, French co-project leader and CEO of the Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire (IHU) of the University of Strasbourg. The existing structures of the project partners are to be bundled, standardized and further developed, particularly with regard to legal and regulatory competencies, the recruitment of patient data, secure data management structures, the analysis of high-throughput data, the modeling of diseases and the support of clinical decisions.

"The implementation of the CLINNOVA initiative offers a unique opportunity to significantly advance innovation and digital transformation in the healthcare sector in the heart of Europe. The clear goal of our research is to make the medicine of the future the present - personalized, precise and geared towards the needs of patients and physicians. The basis for this is the establishment of a data network in which, for the first time, cross-national, federated analyses of interoperable health data are made possible using artificial intelligence. This is of great importance for digital medicine, especially in Luxembourg, which is already closely networked with its neighbors via cross-border patients," says Prof. Dr. Ulf Nehrbass, CEO of the Luxembourg Institute of Health and initiator as well as one of the three coordinators on the CLINNOVA steering committee.