Inflammation research in Northern Germany celebrates success: Further funding for PMI Cluster of Excellence

The PMI Cluster of Excellence has secured funding for a further seven years, enabling it to continue its successful research into chronic inflammatory conditions.

Kiel University (CAU) and the Universität zu Lübeck (UzL) submitted a joint application for continued funding for the Schleswig-Holstein-based Cluster of Excellence Precision Medicine in Chronic Inflammation (PMI). They learned today that their application was successful, as the German Research Foundation (DFG) announced the continued funding of the PMI cluster in the upcoming funding period of the German federal and state governments’ Excellence Strategy. This marks the Cluster’s fourth consecutive success in this highly competitive strand of research funding, and an extremely unusual duration of continuous support. The volume of the funding applied for by the Cluster is almost 70 million Euro; it will cover the period January 2026 to the conclusion of 2032.

The Cluster’s objective: Clinical realization of up-to-the-minute findings for patients’ quality of life

“Our achievement in gaining funding for a fourth consecutive time has confirmed our members’ outstanding scientific achievements and the success of our interdisciplinary collaboration across sciences and institutions. I’m absolutely delighted that we’re now able to continue this successful work and go on making significant advances in precision medicine for chronic inflammatory diseases,” says Prof. Stefan Schreiber, spokesperson of the PMI Cluster. In the funding period that will commence in January 2026, PMI will be focusing its activities on translating research findings to clinical practice.

About the PMI Cluster

The numbers of people in industrialized countries with chronic inflammatory conditions, such as Crohn’s disease, psoriasis, diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis, are continuously increasing. The PMI Cluster of Excellence brings together researchers from various medical and scientific disciplines to work toward emphatic improvements in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of these conditions.

Chronic inflammatory conditions can manifest very differently from person to person, and often take highly individual courses. This means that, while treatment can relieve symptoms and slow the progression of disease in many cases, it is only occasionally possible to bring these conditions to a complete halt. The Cluster’s members hope to change this via precision medicine, that is, diagnostic processes and treatments that are tailored specifically to each individual with the condition. The approach behind this ambition is one that seeks to identify individual differences among patients with the same disease and harness them to combat the condition by using them as a basis for the choice of most appropriate treatment.

The successful application requested continued funding for the PMI Cluster of Excellence, whose work is currently ongoing and which first won funding from the Excellence Strategy, totaling 52.2 million Euro, for the period 2019-2025. The research taking place in PMI builds on its predecessor cluster, Inflammation at Interfaces, which received two periods of funding between 2007 and 2018. The Excellence Strategy is a research funding program run by the German federal and state governments, with the aim of providing long-term support to top-flight research and boosting the international competitiveness of Germany’s universities.

The institutions behind the PMI Cluster are: Kiel University, the Universität zu Lübeck, the University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein (UKSH), the Research Center Borstel – Leibniz Lung Center, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology Plön, the Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel, the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, and the Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education (IPN).

Find out more:

• DFG press release announcing the funding decisions
• PMI Cluster of Excellence website
• Excellence Strategy website
• Kiel University press release on its funding success

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