Stiftung Charité was founded in 2005 by the entrepreneur Johanna Quandt (1926 – 2015). It is an independent private non-profit foundation. Stiftung Charité promotes Berlin as a world-leading center for the life sciences. It supports Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and other life science organizations with funding programs in three key areas: Innovation, Research, and Open Life Science.

Life sciences in Berlin have the potential to be world leading. Stiftung Charité works to ensure that Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and its partner organizations in the life sciences can achieve their full potential in the long term.

We are inspired by Robert Koch, Emil von Behring, Paul Ehrlich, and the other entrepreneurial and scientific minds of the early twentieth century.Max Rubner (1854 – 1932), the grandfather of our founder Johanna Quandt, also belonged to this generation dedicated to the life sciences and university medicine in Berlin.

At Stiftung Charité, we want to usher in a new era in research, innovation, and health while recognizing the radically different conditions that we face in the twenty-first century. Medical advances are faster and more complex, organizations are more international and diverse, and new structures and division of labor in research and healthcare demand greater teamwork and institutional cooperation.

We empower and believe in people. We enable people to reach their potential and perform to the best of their abilities across research and health. From students to Nobel prizewinners, researchers to clinicians, we value equality of opportunity and diversity.

We reward those who take risks. We support endeavors in the life sciences which are commercially innovative, original, and future-oriented. We are open to the fact that projects can go in unexpected new directions.

We create networks. We set up new collaborations between people, disciplines, and institutions. We believe that high-level research and healthcare is inherently interdisciplinary and international.

We launch new missions. We encourage life scientists to take on responsibilities in new areas of university medicine, such as knowledge transfer within and beyond the academic world, the transfer of technologies and knowledge to commercial and social enterprises, the implementation of research output in patient care, and public relations and consultation.

Our advantage as a private foundation. We are a private non-profit foundation with an entrepreneurial outlook. We generally have a greater level of freedom compared to public institutions and funding agencies which are often subject to stricter financial and legal constraints. This freedom allows us to be open to new, early, and complementary programs and initiatives, to be agile and adaptable as funding programs and initiatives develop, to be flexible with timescales, and remain neutral when it comes to the use and distribution of funds. We are committed to the subject areas we fund and are connected to a network of partners across the research and healthcare sectors, including the commercial and start-up sectors, as well as the non-profit sector.