The Helmholtz Association, Germany's largest scientific organisation with 25,700 employees in 15 affiliated research centres and an annual budget of around €2.3bn, has launched an initiative whose long-term goal is "to shed light on the causes of complex disorders and diseases and develop new approaches for treating them".

The project, which will receive up to €24m from the association's Initiative and Networking Fund between now and 2011, centres on systems biology, an interdisciplinary form of research that seeks to understand how individual components interact in, and determine the overall function of, complex biological systems.

The Helmholtz initiative will create a network comprising the association's own research centres, universities and other external partners, which will match the core funding from their own budgets.

The interdisciplinary and cross-institutional programme aims to elucidate cellular processes systematically to provide a better understanding of how, for example, cancer or diseases of the cardiovascular and central nervous systems develop.

The close co-operation with universities will "strengthen the position of systems biology not only within the Helmholtz Association, but also in Germany as a whole", said the association's president, Professor Jürgen Mlynek.

"Over the long term, the results will benefit the diagnosis, prevention and therapy of many widespread diseases."

Earlier this year, a report by the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Academy of Medical Sciences called for three to five new centres of excellence for systems biology to be set up in the UK to prevent the country from lagging behind the US, which currently leads the field in many respects, and fast-growing sectors in Japan or other parts of Europe.

The aim of systems biology, noted Professor Otmar Wiestler, Helmholtz vice-president for health, is to build a comprehensive picture of biological processes "on all levels, from genome to proteome, from organelles to the total organism", relying largely on mathematical models and computer simulations.

The Helmholtz initiative will support research in a wide range of areas, including:

• Signal transmission processes in cancer cells

• The molecular bases of neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases

• The influence of toxins in cell metabolism

• The role of non-coding RNA in regulatory networks

• Neuronal structure and function in the brain

Professor Roland Eils, head of the Theoretical Bioinformatics Division at the German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ), will head up the project, which will involve the DKFZ as well as the following Helmholtz centres:

• The National Research Centre for Environment and Health (GSF)

• The Max Delbrück Centre for Molecular Medicine Berlin-Buch

• The Research Centre Jülich (which focuses on matter, energy, information, life and the environment)

• The Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe (the environment, energy, health and key technologies such as microsystems and nanotechnologies)

• The Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research

• The Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research

The systems biology initiative is one of the measures adopted by the Helmholtz Association within the framework of its Pact on Research and Innovation, aimed at promoting excellence in research and expanding networking with universities.