Hospital of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) Munich, Institute of Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine

General Information

The Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) Munich is one of Germany’s largest universities and is participating in this project with the University Hospital’s Institute of Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine.

The mission of this institute is to improve prevention and treatment of infectious and tropical diseases. It aims at achieving this goal through research, translation of evidence into improved services and policies, and transfer of knowledge. Besides its activities in travel medicine and in providing outpatient and clinical consultant services, the Institute of Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine houses the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) international Clinical Trials Unit (iCTU), led by Prof. M. Hoelscher. The  iCTU is experienced and equipped to design, organize and conduct clinical trials on new treatments, diagnostics and interventions with focus on improvement of health in low- and middle-income countries. Established through many previous and current collaborations, close research partneships are in place with various Sub-Saharan countries, e.g. Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, Ghana, South Africa, Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, The Gambia, and Uganda.

Members of the TherVacB project team are part of an global health research team and the fully functional clinical unit consists of 70 staff members with capabilities in trial design, data management, statistical support, quality monitoring, adverse event/safety management as well in the evaluation of clinical and laboratory endpoints (e.g. immune phenotyping and assessment of humoral immune responses and epitope mapping).

Well established procedures are in place to facilitate cooperation with local teams of medical doctors, study nurses, laboratory personnel, pharmacists, data management and logistic staff of the local sites, which allowed to successfully perform many interventional trials (e.g. MAMS, SQ109, FATI) in the sponsor role and additionally more than 15 non-interventional studies under the oversight of the iCTU.