Nerve cells cultivated from mouse stem cells
© Alessandra Zappulo / Marina Chekulaeva Lab, MDC

Project call for “Single cell approaches in personalized medicine”

BIH/Charité/MDC focus area

The focus area “Single cell approaches for personalized medicine” invites BIH/Charité/MDC scientists to propose translational use case projects to solve central questions of translational or clinical biomedicine and serve the mission of the focus area. This call is planned as a series of up to 3 calls until November 2026.
SCFA call project poster

"Single cell approaches for personalized medicine" is a joint focus area of the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH), Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin and Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine with the aim to make highly innovative single-cell approaches clinically usable for effective translation. 

Eligibility and requirements

This call invites teams of up to 3 scientists (PI or leading scientist) from the 3 partner institutions to suggest collaborative projects (MDC1+BIH or MDC1+Charité, MDC1+BIH+Charité) using human organoids or human samples, preferably collected in clinical studies. Sequencing will be carried out by the MDC/BIH Genomics Technology Platform (samples need to be ready latest by 1.10.2025).

Budget: Projects should be within a budget of up to 30,000 EUR and to be completed within the calendar year of the award. Only consumables are eligible for funding. Please provide approval for the proposed sequencing related budget by the MDC/BIH Genomics Technology Platform.

Objectives

  • Develop & apply single-cell approaches to clinical questions
  • Advance spatial or multi-omic analysis of human samples
  • Foster translational collaborations

Application procedure

Interested scientists may submit their proposals by sending the filled project template and budget approval to Grietje Krabbe (grietje.krabbe@mdc-berlin.de) until 5 January, 2025. 

Valid ethical and legal documents relative to the research proposal need to be submitted before the project start.

Selection procedure

Eligible proposals will be evaluated in a single-stage process by an international reviewer board which will give recommendations for funding to the steering committee of the focus area. Evaluation criteria include:

  • Fit with the objectives of the Focus Area Single cell approaches for personalized medicine, e.g. the development or application of advanced single-cell (multi)-omic or spatial analysis to address clinically relevant questions
  • transformative and translational potential of the project
  • scientific quality and impact
  • feasibility (sample availability and quality, experimental design & modality, statistics, data analysis and management) and budget