The Borstel Research Center is the Lung Research Center of the Leibniz Association. It investigates diseases associated with civilization such as asthma and COPD as well as lung infections, especially tuberculosis (TB). The overriding goal of the basically interdisciplinary and translational research activities is to elucidate the causes and mechanisms of infectious and non-infectious chronic inflammatory diseases of the lung in order to derive new innovative concepts for their prevention, diagnosis and therapy.