imaGenes is the spin-off from the German Resource Center for Genome Research (RZPD) which has proven its benefit for German and international genome research as a research infrastructure for many years. The RZPD was established in 1995 within the German Human Genome Project (DHGP) at the Department of Hans Lehrach, Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, Berlin, and the Department of Annemarie Poustka, Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum (DKFZ), Heidelberg. Shareholders of RZPD were three of the leading German research institutions in the field of genomics, the Max Planck Society, the  DKFZ, and the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine MDC.

Since the year 2000 we had developed and implemented cost-recovery models for this kind of increasingly important research infrastructure (Weaver et al., Nature Reviews Genetics 2004, Schofield et al., Nature 2009). Self-sustaining and profitable business units were eventually established as imaGenes GmbH by RZPD’s former key management team in December 2006 and started its operations – including RZPD’s former website – in July 2007.