The main objective of this paper is to show how efficiently Siemens Healthcare connects knowledge holders and knowledge recipients from various disciplines within the company. Siemens offers its customers products and solutions for the entire range of patient care from a single source – from prevention and early detection to diagnosis, treatment, and aftercare. Optimizing clinical workflows always requires a multidisciplinary team and a collaborative structure between e.g. medical advisors, researchers, scientists, and healthcare economists. This new form of collaboration brings together experts with deep technical experience, physicians with specialized medical knowledge, as well as people with comprehensive knowledge about health economics. To create a knowledge network Siemens Healthcare introduced the Clinical Competence Centers for specialized medical knowledge, the Clinical Knowledge Base as online platform for disease specific information and the Healthcare Academy for medical education and web-based trainings. These are impressive examples of the successful knowledge management and education strategy of Siemensthe

In this study we aimed to evaluate the protein expression of class I histone deacetylases (HDAC) in testicular germ cell tumours (GCT) and to analyse differences between the histological subtypes of testicular GCT. 325 testicular GCT were included in a tissue microarray with each histological subtype of the tumour being separately represented on this array. Expression of class I HDAC isoforms 1, 2 and 3 was assessed by immunohistochemistry. While HDAC2 and 3 were highly expressed in all histological subtypes of GCT, HDAC1 was almost consistently expressed at lower levels. We observed significant differences in the expression of the respective HDACs between seminoma and non-seminoma GCT tissue components. Interestingly, choriocarcinomas showed generally high expression values for all three class I HDAC isoforms. Relevant correlations with clinicopathological parameters could not be demonstrated. Contrasting published findings on other tumour entities, no immediate practical diagnostic or prognostic value for HDAC1-3 in GCT could be inferred. However, the high expression levels might still be indicative for a treatment response to HDAC inhibitors which ought to be evaluated in further studies.