The LOOP Zurich

The LOOP Zurich is a translational research center in Zurich, with an initial focus on precision medicine*. It combines the strength in basic research in biomedicine and bioinformatics of the two universities in Zurich, ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich, with clinical research from the city’s four university hospitals. The hospitals’ unparalleled access to patients and in-depth knowledge of their needs together with the research infrastructures at the University of Zurich and ETH will enable the implementation of novel and innovative strategies for translational research projects. The goal of The LOOP Zurich is to improve the understanding of disease based on patient-derived material and information. Modern analytics, bioinformatics and data processing tools, capable of handling large data collections, will generate new insights into the understanding of origins and course of diseases, and thereby facilitate the development of innovative, disease-modifying therapies in order to meet the needs of individual patients efficiently and comprehensively. The Loop Zürich projects will benefit from access to large patient databases and biobanks that constitute a tremendous resource of biomedical information. Correspondingly, bioinformatics including machine learning tools will play a critical role in this context. * Under the term precision medicine we understand the customization of healthcare measures to the individual patient, or more precisely, to the specific molecular make-up linked to a pathology.