There are very few places world-wide that offer such a unique, balanced, and high-level concentration of research groups in nearly all fields of structural biology and protein networks. All research groups have published recently in the very best international journals such as Nature, Science, and Cell and all are considered world leaders in their respective field of research, documented by numerous awards. The great advantage of this collection of outstanding labs is the very high complementarity in terms of research interests and techniques. Most notably, the laboratories have in most cases already begun to collaborate and share a common interest for expansion of their research into the field of molecular systems biology. CIPS^M will formalize and foster a unique approach of combining structure and function into a holistic understanding of biological processes. It is expected that this effort leads to the advent of a new field that could be described as molecular systems biology.