BMBF (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung)
BMBF financially supports R+D by specific funding programs within a broad spectrum of research areas. Innovative projects are funded on the basis of public competitive calls and subsequent peer-review evaluation. The total budget of the BMBF is about € 8.3 billion per year.

Since 2003 BMBF has been funding research on rare diseases as one of the priorities of the national framework program “Health Research: Research for People”, which is managed by PT-DLR. Currently, ten disease-specific networks are being supported for a total budget of around 5-6 million per year.