About Us

Coordinating Center

The SPRINT Coordinating Center (CC) consists of a Core team and multiple research groups all hosted at Charité Berlin and the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH) at Charité Berlin. The CC fulfills the following tasks:

Manage network communications (off-line, virtual and in person meetings), and prepare the minutes for approval.
Draft and distribute the SOPs for decision making by the SC.
Facilitate animal protocol approvals by drafting a master protocol to be adopted and modified as needed by all sites.
Manage harmonization process.
Serve as the Trial Management Committee (TMC), responsible for execution of the study day-to-day (from centralized randomization to data analyses and reporting).
Manage the database, on-site data verification, data storage and data analysis.
Manage the network funds flow, initiates outside funding applications.
Manage network publications (chairs publication committee, PC) and public-facing contents (website, Wiki, public announcements).
Serve as the Data monitoring committee (DMC): Monitor study delivery and data veracity and help make decisions about continuing or stopping an intervention in multistage studies. Ensures that a sufficient but not excessive number of animals are studied.
To maintain blinding and rigor, the CC may adopt CC only SOPs that are not shared with study sites or intervention PIs.

Core Team, Charité

Prof. Dr. Matthias Endres, Principal Investigator

Prof. Cenk Ayata, MD, PhD, Principal Investigator

Dr. Isra Tamim, MD/PhD, Coordinator CC

Dr. Paul Fischer, MD/PhD, Coordinator CC

Laura Kate Ismajli, BSc, Student assistant

DECIDE, BIH at Charité

PD Dr. Ulf Tölch, Research Group Leader

Dr. Pasquale Pellegrini, Postdoctoral Fellow

Preclinical research aims to develop new therapies and ultimately bring them to patients by translating basic scientific findings into applied research. Before moving to clinical trials, the effectiveness of these new treatments must be rigorously tested in experimental settings. However, frequent errors in this translational process often prevent clinical trials from building on promising preclinical results, resulting in a translational gap with broad medical, economic, social, and ethical consequences.

To address this (confirmatory) preclinical studies are supported by the DECIDE project, which offers consultation and seeks to identify success factors and develop guidelines for such studies. Amongst others, DECIDE has produced a guidance document to assist researchers in planning and conducting confirmatory preclinical studies and systematic reviews. For the SPRINT network DECIDE will provide essential support in statistics, logistics, SOPs and trial planning.

Responsible PrecliniX, BIH at Charité

Dr. Natascha Drude, Research Group Leader

Responsible PrecliniX aims to evaluate and improve preclinical research and to support researchers in generating patient-relevant and robust findings, ensuring high research standards and clinical relevance, and thus enabling iterative translation from bench to bedside and back. It offers needs assessment such as Metric-based evaluation, SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) or Identification of areas for action. Services aim to cover the entire translational road from bench to bedside and include support in preregistration, experimental design or process optimization amongst others.

EPIC3R - Neuroimaging, Charité

EPIC

Prof. Dr. Philipp Böhm-Sturm, Research Group Leader

Research Group Boehm-Sturm mainly focuses on quantitative MRI. Using biophysical models, quantitative MRI establishes a link between measured MRI parameters (e.g. change of water diffusion after a stroke) and important biological parameters (e.g. cellular swelling) to increase the validity of the MRI for stroke diagnosis, but also for therapy evaluation. Imaging allows noninvasive acquisition of data on the living animal and therefore contributes to implementing the 3R (Replace, Reduce, Refine) in animal experiments. Philipp Boehm-Sturm is head of the technology platform "ExPerimental Imaging" at Charité (EPIC3R) within Charité 3R, which aims to improve the preclinical imaging infrastructure at Charité.