The University of Bern is a comprehensive university with 8 faculties, 18,579 students and 4,108 full-time positions in Switzerland. The University Children’s Hospital Bern is Switzerland’s second largest Children’s Hospital. It is part of the Insel Gruppe, a network of hospitals comprising the Inselspital, the Spital Tiefenau in Bern, and 4 regional hospitals. Together these 6 hospitals make up Switzerland’s largest comprehensive health care system and cover a population area of approximately 2 million inhabitants of central Switzerland. The University Children’s Hospital Bern is a recognised tertiary referral centre of excellence for education and research in childhood medicine.
University of Bern will setup, perform, and monitor the prospective recruitment of children across the entire paediatric age range for DIAMONDS, providing in depth phenotype characterisation, biobanking, and access to health-care resource-use data. Activities will range from patients in accident and emergency departments, to intensive care units, and wards. In addition, the University of Bern will provide access to the biobank established through the Swiss Pediatric Sepsis Study with DNA, RNA, serum, and pathogens of 750 children aged 0-17 years with blood culture-confirmed infection. This includes 300 children with diagnostically challenging infections, immunosuppression, postoperative infections, and inflammatory diseases. These samples can serve as a gold standard of confirmed bacterial infections to evaluate and validate promising new genomic, transcriptomic, and phenotypic markers of infection.
The infectious diseases team at the University Children’s Hospital Bern has a long-standing research focus on the epidemiology of severe infections in children, the role of innate and mucosal immunity and host-pathogen interaction in severe infections, and sepsis markers. The University Children’s Hospital Bern has successfully led the Swiss Paediatric Sepsis Study together with the Paediatric Infectious Disease Group of Switzerland.
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This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 848196