Overview

The Berlin School of Integrative Oncology (BSIO) is funded within the Excellence Initiative of the German federal and state governments. The BSIO offers a structured 3-year doctoral program jointly educating natural scientists and physicians/medical students in the field of integrative oncology. The BSIO aims to bring understanding of malignant growth to a new conceptual level, i.e. to expand the molecular, cellular, organismal and systems biology research focus by utilizing advanced experimental and simulatory models to develop novel diagnostic and therapeutic approaches, and to make them available for a clinical testing. The belief and the vision of the BSIO is that only best trained scientists and clinicians capable of seamlessly communicating with each other will succeed together to overcome therapeutic barriers to the elimination of cancer by cooperatively developing innovative therapeutic solutions. The BSIO aims to sharpen scientific thinking and problem solving, and to provide an excellent research environment with inspiring international training structures in which highly talented graduate students and postgraduate scientists from all over the world will be guided through the early phases of their careers in translational and clinically-oriented cancer research. It is the central mission of the interdisciplinary graduate school to introduce basic scientists to the most demanding problems in clinical oncology, and, in turn, to stimulate young research-interested clinicians to translate unsolved clinical challenges into experimentally approachable questions, ultimately leading to their mechanistic explanation.