Lékařská fakulta v Plzni má nové univerzitní medicínské centrum The Faculty of Medicine in Pilsen has a new university medical center

Plzeň - The Faculty of Medicine of Charles University has opened a new university medical center in Plzeň, which will offer top-notch research and student education. The mini-campus, located in close proximity to the university hospital, consists of a building for theoretical institutes primarily intended for teaching and a Biomedical Center focused on research and development. The construction of the complex took nearly two years and cost over half a billion Czech korunas.
    "In our 65 years of existence, we have not received any funds from anyone to further develop and enhance our instrument and scientific potential until this moment," said Boris Kreuzberg, dean of the medical faculty in Plzeň.
    The new building for theoretical institutes, a seven-story facility covering approximately 5000 m², will be used for teaching all 2000 students of the faculty. Five institutes of the Plzeň medical faculty have moved into the modern spaces, namely the Institute of Biophysics, Biology, Pharmacology and Toxicology, Physiology, and Pathological Physiology. In the future, the faculty plans to secure funds for another building to relocate the remaining institutes from inadequate premises.
    In the Biomedical Center, which covers over 4000 m², featuring two buildings of highly specialized laboratories and workspaces, 110 researchers will work, a quarter of whom are PhD program students. The center will focus exclusively on research and development in the area of organ replacement and regeneration. As the only institution in the region, it primarily targets biomedical research, engaging in both basic and applied research.
    The center will include, among other things, a laboratory of experimental neurophysiology focusing on brain research, particularly memory. It is led by Karel Ježek, who until recently was at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, part of the university in Trondheim, where May-Britt and Edvard Moser work. They were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine this year. Ježek spent seven years in their team and continues to collaborate with them. As he told ČTK, he has been building his team in Plzeň since January and received five million korunas for establishing the laboratory. "We are primarily interested in how memory is organized in the brain, in neural networks," he stated.
    The center will also conduct applied research to expand kidney transplant possibilities, optimize dialysis treatment, identify biomarkers for organ damage, work on improving artificial insemination techniques, and explore methods for working with stem cells and their use in regenerating the heart or liver.
    The mini-campus is funded by the Research and Development for Innovations program and complemented by the university's own resources. The grant for the building of the theoretical institutes is 161 million CZK, and for the center, it is 408 million CZK. According to the rector of Charles University, Tomáš Zima, there is an effort to secure funds for the construction of a third building in the next programming period. "So that the faculty is all in one place," he stated.