According to the World Health Organization, more than 5 million children under the age of 5 die every year. The largest burden of disease and mortality is carried by low- and middle- income countries.¹ Many of these deaths could be averted with appropriate preventive measures and adequate therapies.

There is a critical need to develop and implement new, cost-effective and robust healthcare solutions and interventions for newborns, children and adolescents. Innovative biomedical research and digital health technologies have the potential to address unmet medical needs around the world. However, in order to be impactful, solutions and interventions need to be context-specific and translatable.

In order to develop innovative, efficient and effective healthcare interventions and treatments for paediatric patients worldwide, the University of Basel and ETH Zurich jointly founded the Botnar Research Centre for Child Health (BRCCH). Now the Basel Research Centre for Child Health, this independent research centre is generously supported by Basel-based Fondation Botnar, a separate organisation but nevertheless with which the centre has close interactions. The BRCCH began its operations in 2019.

Our Mandate is to drive outstanding and innovative scientific research that will lead to improved health outcomes and well-being in children and adolescents. The Centre addresses unmet medical needs, seeks to develop and improve diagnostic tools and designs novel interventions for young people, especially those in low- and middle-income countries.

Our Mission is to embrace the expertise of our partner institutions and thus foster a research community that is able to develop new healthcare solutions for the benefit of young people worldwide. To make this happen, physicians and scientists work together in multidisciplinary teams to recognize medical needs, implement innovative research, and scale feasible solutions. The BRCCH pursues these goals collaboratively with partners across the globe.

Our Vision for the BRCCH is to create a centre which fosters multidisciplinary and translational research in order to address unmet medical needs in paediatric health. The objectives are to create novel solutions for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease and to develop tools that can accurately predict their course. The BRCCH aims to become a crystallisation point for national and international expertise in child health.