Project requirements and funding lines
The NUM promotes clinical, clinical-epidemiological or other practice-changing research, taking a collaborative, non-competitive approach to research based on partnership and data sharing. For this reason, NUM activities must require the participation of most or all German academic medical centres, involving all relevant disciplines. To achieve its goals, the NUM initiates and supports large, multi-centre research projects, clinical and clinical-epidemiological studies and platforms that are not funded or organised by other research or funding institutions due to their scope or structure.
All projects funded by the NUM fall into one of two categories corresponding to two funding lines:
- Research and data infrastructures: providing interoperable platforms for the design and implementation of collaborative research projects at national level. This includes research and data infrastructures that support the collection, management, storage, linkage, exchange, analysis and provision of clinical data and biosamples.
- Research projects ("use cases"): Design and implementation of collaborative, multi-centre research projects, i.e. prospective and retrospective clinical and clinical-epidemiological studies and data analyses, which typically use and further develop NUM research infrastructures and focus on the reusability of data and biosamples for multiple research questions.