University medicine in a national network
The Network of University Medicine (NUM) was launched on 1 April 2020 as an ad hoc project of the federal government to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. The current governance of the NUM is organised accordingly. Until the end of the current 2nd funding phase in June 2025, the NUM will be steered by a National Task Force, which includes the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as the funder and the Federal Ministry of Health (BMG). The network is organised by a coordination office at Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin. Each of the 36 participating academic medical centres has set up a local coordination unit (LokS), which coordinates the administrative implementation of the numerous NUM research projects on site. The network also works closely with other stakeholders, expert networks, specialist groups and initiatives in the field of clinical research and pandemic preparedness. These include, for example, non-university research institutions, the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII) and the German Centres for Health Research (DZG).
Financing
The BMBF is funding the NUM. In the first funding phase, which ran from April 2020 to December 2021, the network was established and joint research by German university medicine to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic was strengthened. The BMBF provided 150 million euros for this purpose. For the second funding phase from January 2022 to the end of June 2025, the NUM has around 240 million euros at its disposal.
