One of the major events of 2025 was the arrival of Unisanté on the Biopôle campus. To mark this milestone, we spoke to Dr Karim Boubaker, who was appointed Director General of Unisanté in August. In our conversation, he reflected on Unisanté’s strategic strengths, the opportunities created by Unisanté’s move to Biopôle and his vision for the future.
Building a healthcare alliance
As Dr Boubaker put it, “the story of Unisanté is fundamentally a nice one – of people coming together for the greater good”. Created by bringing together several complementary institutions that previously worked independently, including primary care, occupational health, cancer screening and public health research, it is founded on a spirit of collaboration, as well as on the concept of “strength in numbers”. In Dr Boubaker’s words, “when these activities are united in a single institution, they gain the visibility and capacity they need to operate at the top of their game – and to grow”.
Unisanté’s mission, as evoked by Dr Boubaker, is to offer a more impactful and coherent approach to health, supporting people both when they are ill and when they are (and want to remain) healthy. What’s more, by combining clinical medicine, research, teaching and specialised expertise, it seeks to establish new integrated models of care, which ultimately offer increased efficiency and accessibility.“We don’t just want to offer services to individuals,” he asserted. “We want to take a more overarching approach to healthcare – what I call ‘community healthcare’ – incorporating learnings as we go along to serve the entire population.”
Integrating different disciplines to advance community health
Widening access to healthcare is one of Dr Boubaker’s raisons d’être.“Even though we’re a university centre, we don’t just focus on the academic perspective,” he said. “In everything we do, we are working to strengthen access to care, improve health equity and evolve the system so that it better serves vulnerable populations.”
In this, Dr Boubaker draws on his wide-ranging expertise in internal medicine, infectious diseases and disease management. Having worked as a medical doctor as well as in health policy – holding roles such as Cantonal Physician of Vaud and Head of Infectious Diseases at the Federal Office of Public Health – he has extensive knowledge of both epidemiology and healthcare systems, legislation and governance. This multidisciplinary path ultimately led him to Unisanté, whose integrated vision of primary care and public health aligns closely with his background. “It’s a rather unique career path – but it led me to the right place at the right time. My background in both medicine and policy puts me in a good position to steer Unisanté into the future.”
Driving Unisanté forwards
When discussing strategic priorities, Dr Boubaker emphasised the pressing need to consolidate Unisanté as a strong and resilient institution in today’s complex financial and political context, reinforcing its role as a university-level centre of excellence across all of its activities – primary care, research, public health and community medicine.
In the longer term, he envisages that Unisanté might act as a reference point for the evolution of the healthcare system in Switzerland. “If I have a dream,” he stated, “it’s that Unisanté will set an example with its integrated, population-wide primary care model, delivering high-quality services at a reasonable cost and ensuring equitable, continuous and compassionate care. There’s a lot of work to be done on this front – it won’t be easy to roll out this model in other contexts – but I’m still hopeful we can do it.”
Unisanté’s move to Biopôle is central to this objective. By consolidating Unisanté’s activities at this dynamic life sciences ecosystem, Dr Boubaker not only seeks to bring all his teams together under one roof, but also strengthen collaboration and integration with other innovators. “We’ve been working with people at Biopôle for years,” he reminded us. “But by operating in closer proximity to entrepreneurs, researchers and academics on campus, we hope to see even more collaboration opportunities – leading to new ideas and resources that we can feed back into the community. After all, what defines us is our ‘the community must benefit’ mindset. For us, this is the start of an exciting adventure – we can’t wait to see what lies ahead.”
