When Sander returned to Germany in 2022 to take over the management of the Max Delbrück Center, she was surprised at how little presence the term bioengineering has in this country compared to the USA or Great Britain. There were no separate departments here, no bachelor’s or master’s degree programs. Instead, a fairly blank spot on the research map. And that despite the fact that everything is there to play on the field.
Sander is optimistic that this gap can be closed very quickly. On the one hand, appropriate investments must be made in training and infrastructure. On the other hand, institutions like the Helmholtz Association can already make a significant contribution. “We have everything we need because we are extremely interdisciplinary. For us it’s not just about medicine or biology. We have institutes like DESY in Hamburg or the Helmholtz Center in Berlin, where physicists and engineers work with particle accelerators. In Dresden-Rossendorf we are researching new materials. Now the main thing is to link these individual areas together.”
The recently founded Biomedical Engineering Taskforce is intended to help. It uses the expertise and infrastructure of a large number of Helmholtz research centers beyond the field of health to further advance the “biomedical engineering revolution” and better connect research and industry. Six core projects will be developed over the next few years – from concept to market-ready application.
One of the projects is dedicated to the development of new molecular diagnostics for the early detection and prevention of common diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, cancer, dementia or diabetes. Ideally, biomedical and AI-based multi-omics methods can analyze many different types of biological samples at multiple levels, such as genomics (DNA), proteomics (proteins) or metabolomics (metabolites). This means that new illnesses or relapses can be detected much earlier than before, possibly even before clinical symptoms appear.