CIBEK

The whole story

The Hospital Clínic, a centenary institution

The Hospital Clínic is a center with 100 years of experience. In 1906, the Universitat de Barcelona left the Hospital de la Santa Creu, a building from the 16th century in the old part of the city, and moved the medical faculty to a new location in the central district of Barcelona’s Eixample. It was the first Catalan hospital to be built following a modern architectural concept, and it is for this very reason it still remains active today.

There are two periods in the history of the Hospital Clínic which are worth mentioning. The first one comprises the years 1928 to 1936, when the Hospital Clínic and the Faculty of Medicine, together with the Physiology Institute, directed by the Professor August Pi i Sunyer, joined the international scientific circle. The second one lasts until today. It starts in 1971, when the hospital underwent an extensive organizational restructuring. The doctors became more important in the management of the center and, in this context, many of them broadened their studies in European and American centers. They imported the role of the clinic researcher, a role that became widespread in the hospital two decades earlier than in other Spanish hospitals.

Fundació Clinic and Institut d’Investigacions Biomèdiques August Pi i Sunyer

The Hospital Clínic is a public center practicing high quality medicine with a critical sense. In addition, it is the leading Spanish institution and ranks tenth in Europe in terms of scientific output. To ensure an appropriate management of its resources, the Fundació Clínic per a la Recerca Biomèdica was created in 1985. Finally, in order to make the most of the synergies between clinical and basic research, a group of doctors from the Hospital Clínic and researchers from the Faculty of Medicine and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) founded the Institut d’Investigacions Biomèdiques August Pi i Sunyer (IDIBAPS) in 1996.

CIBEK: Three initiatives meet

The Centro de Investigación Biomédica Esther Koplowitz (CIBEK), to be developed at the start of 2007, was born in December 2005, when Esther Koplowitz decided to make a donation to the Fundació Clínic in order to build a research center. This apt decision will, with no doubt, provide the Hospital Clinic and IDIBAPS with a powerful instrument to continue leading the biomedical research in Spain and, above all, to be internationally competitive.

The CIBEK is the result of three combined initiatives. First, the decision of the doctors from the Hospital Clínic, through the Fundació Clínic, to purchase a plot of land near the hospital in order to build a research center. Second, the decision of Esther Koplowitz to finance that center. The Esther Koplowitz Foundation has already allocated generous resources to the care of the helpless, but this is its first significant incursion in the field of advanced medical research. Without generous donation, the research center could not have been built in years. Finally, the third factor is the support of the Generalitat de Catalunya, the Universitat de Barcelona and the Instituto Carlos III to the project.

© Fundació Clínic - Cibek 2007 Legal note