The excellence initiative aims to promote top-level research at universities and make them lighthouses with an international reach. For this purpose, the federal and Länder governments came to an agreement in June 2005 that within the excellence initiative selected graduate schools, clusters of excellence and institutional strategies in the higher education system will receive 1.9 billion Euros. The university applications were reviewed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft  (German Research Foundation – DFG) and the Wissenschaftsrat  (German Council of Science and Humanities – WR).
There were two application rounds. Decisions in the first round were made on 13 October 2006.

TU Dresden was the only university in the new Länder to be successful with both a

• graduate school "Dresden International Graduate School for Biomedicine and Bioengineering (DIGS-BB)"  and also an
• excellence cluster "From Cells to Tissues to Therapies (CRTD)" 

under the federal excellence initiative.

Regenerative medicine and molecular bioengineering form one of the five profile lines of TU Dresden. Thus the promotion of the graduate school and also the cluster of excellence by the DFG under the excellence initiative honours Technische Universität Dresden’s successes in the areas mentioned. The international review panel came to the conclusion that TUD will be able to compete with the world’s best universities.
http://www.exzellenz-initiative.de.