In 2008, the Luxembourg government announced its 'Health Initiative' which consisted in investing significant amounts of resources in Luxembourg's biotechnology sector. The goal of this initiative was to transform the Grand Duchy into a center of excellence in the area of personalized medicine.

Personalized medicine is an emerging field of medicine that aims to improve medicine through more individualized care. This is largely made possibly thanks to new technologies that provide data such as genome sequences and gene expression profiles to the physicians. These datatypes will support doctors in more accurately diagnosing disease and treating individual patients.

Key players of the Luxembourg biomedical sector are the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) and the University’s Life Sciences Research Unit (LSRU), as well as the Integrated Biobank of Luxembourg (IBBL) and the Public Health Research Centre CRP-Santé.
 
LCSB, IBBL and CRP Santé jointly established the Personalised Medicine Consortium (PMC) of Luxembourg.

Accelerating Biomedicine

The LCSB was founded in 2009 as the first biomedical research centre of the University of Luxembourg. Professor Dr. Rudi Balling, former director of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Braunschweig, Germany, is the founding director of this research institute. The main goal of the LCSB is to accelerate biomedical research by closing the link between systems biology and medical research. The LCSB focuses on the study of neurodegenerative diseases, with an emphasis on Parkinson’s disease.

The LCSB currently counts about 80 employees and 7 research groups in the areas of experimental neurobiology, cell metabolism, computational biology, bioinformatics, machine learning, eco-systems biology, and translational medicine.  Collaboration between biologists, medical doctors, computer scientists, physicists and mathematicians is offering new insights into complex systems like cells, organs and whole organisms in both health and disease states.
 
As a relatively young research institutes, the LCSB relies on the collaboration with international partners. It has therefore engaged in several knowledge transfer programmes where local researchers are sent abroad, for a few months to a year, to learn about new technologies and research methods, with the goal to bring this knowledge back to Luxembourg. LCSB's research partners include Dr. Leroy Hood's 'Institute for Systems Biology' (ISB) in Seattle, USA, and Dr. Hiroaki Kitano's 'Systems Biology Institute' in Tokyo, Japan.