Mission

The Foundation’s mission is to encourage research for rare and orphan diseases. The BLACKSWAN Foundation was established in Switzerland in 2010 to contribute to the development of research on rare and orphan diseases worldwide. The Foundation supports research on all different types of rare and orphan disease, which makes its vision unique and helps in finding new solutions that can assist a large variety of projects. Besides its funding research mission, the Foundation organizes every two years the RE(ACT) Congress, which became an international reference point for rare disease experts. In three editions, more than 1,500 scientists were able to establish approximately fifty collaborations. In 2014, the BLACKSWAN Foundation launched the RE(ACT) Community a crowdfunding and a knowledge sharing digital platform that connects researchers, patients and other rare disease stakeholders.

Its goals are:

To collect funds directed toward research in rare and orphan diseases.
To support translational and clinical research by allocating resources to investigators working on rare and orphan diseases.
To collect funds directed toward research for a specific rare and orphan diseases (e.g. liver metabolic diseases).
To promote and encourage therapeutic trials aimed at developing curative drugs for rare and orphan diseases.
To inform the public on rare and orphan diseases.