Academisch Medisch Centrum Universiteit van Amsterdam

Patient care, research and education are the three main cornerstones supporting the Academic Medical Center. These also represent its strengths, earning the AMC a leading position both nationally and internationally. But there is always room for improvement. With this axiom in mind, the AMC is launching an innovation initiative in 2009 that will see the Board of Directors invest an additional ten million euros annually in ten different innovation tracks during a four-year period.

This innovation initiative will also serve as a framework for channelling additional funds into so-called UvA research priority areas, developed as platforms for collaboration between – in this case – the AMC and other University faculties. The AMC has three such priority areas: Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Global Health and Development and Systems Biology.

The Brain and Cognitive Sciences priority area allies a number of AMC groups (including Psychiatry, Neurology, Radiology and Nuclear Medicine) with the UvA faculties of Biology and Psychology and the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN) of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). Another participant is the Spinoza Centre for Neuroimaging, currently being developed jointly by the AMC and NIN.

The Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development (AIGHD) aims to tackle global health issues by forging synergies between health care delivery, disease-specific knowledge, research and education in a truly global context. The AIGHD partnership is designed to provide continued impetus for the AMC’s position as Europe’s leader in scientific research on diseases and healthcare in non-Western countries. This institute joins the AMC Center for Poverty-related Communicable Diseases (CPCD) and development economists at the UvA and VU University Amsterdam with PharmAccess and the Health Insurance Fund.

Systems Biology is a partnership between the AMC and the Faculty of Science. By placing metabolic syndrome under the lens of systems biology, this priority area will supply a huge impulse for fundamental research at the AMC.

Laatste wijziging: 29-12-2009