Collaboration

$600K for Research: QBI and Freie Universität Berlin Come Together

Photo: Nevan Krogan, QBI Director, (center left) and Jacqueline Fabius, QBI Chief Operating Officer, (right) welcome Günter Ziegler, president of FUB, (center right) and Claudia Niggebrügge from the Research Funding Support Service at FUB, (left) to the QBI/UCSF campus during their meeting in San Francisco.


The Quantitative Biosciences Institute (QBI) and Freie Universität Berlin (FUB) have agreed to each contribute $300K to fuel further collaborations between scientists in Berlin and San Francisco, just three months after they launched their first joint-symposium in Germany.

The symposium, titled “The first UCSF-Berlin Integrative Structural Biology Meeting,” was the first in an annual series designed to introduce the collaborative potential between scientists at both universities by highlighting similarities in their work. 

With promising parallels between their fields, ranging from applications of novel technologies, research of fundamental biology and the study of diseases like cancer and infectious diseases, the goal to raise funds to support budding partnerships became imperative.

On Wednesday, August 21, the president of FUB, Günter M. Ziegler, met with QBI Director, Nevan Krogan, in San Francisco to finalize their financial agreement totaling $600K and to sign an MOU between the two institutions. 

With such an immediate outcome, QBI and FUB are in a unique position to spearhead new approaches that take disease-relevant molecular case studies to the next level. 

Ziegler emphasized that it’s important to prioritize the science to make the collaboration worthwhile. “I think there are different expertise, viewpoints and methods to bring together and I want to see that live … we’re in a phase where we’re excited about new methods and new possibilities,” he said.

The unique group of scientific leaders with experience in complementing experimental systems across both locations will allow for the implementation of different technology platforms in collaborative projects.

“We’re very focused here at QBI on developing new tools that are more and more quantitative. That quantitative approach is what FUB is looking at as well, so there is a great deal of synergy around technologies, if you will, that are disease agnostic, and I think we can connect them to many diseases. A lot of what’s going to come out of this is the development of structural biology that can and will be applied to many different disease areas,” said Krogan.