The development of new therapeutic strategies for different types of diseases requires dedicated instruments capable of encompassing biological problems in their entirety by monitoring them at all relevant length- and timescales. The EU-funded FAIR CHARM project aims at providing two complementary imaging solutions, SWIM and SLIDE, which transform the capacity to capture in real-time the biological processes as well as the cellular and extracellular structures involved in disease onset and progression. While the SWIM microscope uses novel laser sources in the infrared wavelength region around 1700 nm to penetrate deeper into biological tissue, the SLIDE microscope pushes the boundaries of fast multiphoton microscopy to imaging rates in excess of several thousand images per second.