Convinced by the at the time unusual concept, Dr. Hansjörg Wyss was ready to generously support the creation of this center and opened the door to other benefactors so that a musculoskeletal institute could be created without any tax money. Substantial contributions came from the Zürich lottery fund and from third persons.
In 2010 ResOrtho and the Balgrist founded the Balgrist Campus non-for-profit stock corporation. Within 5 years, concept, architecture and operations were conceived and realized, the inaugural ceremony took place in the presence of the Swiss Federal Councilor J. Schneider Ammann and representatives of the university, government and industry on December 4, 2015. To this date the research institution is a non-for-profit organization dedicated to improve the human condition by preventing or successfully treating musculoskeletal injury and disease.
The Balgrist Campus has the mission to bring patients, physicians, researchers and industry together. Particularly «hot» topics which are close to a breakthrough are prioritized and the Balgrist Campus tries to bring in international top researchers to realize these breakthroughs. For this purpose, a group sabbatical was created with which international leaders with their closest collaborators visit the Campus for 3 to 12 months and collaborate with their peers in view of solving a priority problem. In a very successful pilot project Prof. Samuel Ward, Chief of Research for Orthopaedics and Bioengineering at the University of California San Diego and Director of the Muscle Lab spent a year at Balgrist Campus in 2016 and confirmed that this would be a superb project for the future to advance the Campus and the science. Thereafter Prof. N. Navab from Munich had a similar arrangement and contributed very substantial to the advancement of augmented and virtual reality projects in orthopaedics.
We are happy to provide you with further information in view of the continuous support of the group sabbatical.