COLUMN. The needs of our institutes and departments will guide how Sahlgrenska Academy’s facilities are developed, Dean Agneta Holmäng writes in her column. Once Sahlgrenska Academy decides how we want to meet our facility needs, the individual research teams will determine as far as possible the environment they wish to be in.
When Sahlgrenska Academy celebrates its 20th anniversary next year, we can be happy that each of the fields brought together in this organization has excelled in terms of research. We are leaders nationally, and in some respects internationally, in both odontology and nursing research. The same applies to the various parts of our medical research: clinical, basic and epidemiological. So we have good reason to be proud of our faculty and have mutual respect for its various branches. And together, we can see that the creation of Sahlgrenska Academy has been a success.
In the former medical faculty, discussions often touched on which type of medical research is most important. Should we focus on preclinical or clinical research? Or, to be relevant, should all medical research projects be both preclinical and clinical, in other words, translational? In recent years, however, I think that previous rivalries among various parts of the faculty have largely disappeared, something we should be happy about.
All medical research, including research in odontology and health care, should have the ultimate goal of increasing our capacity to prevent, treat or alleviate illnesses. Without clinical research, the results of preclinical research would be of little use. Likewise, most major clinical breakthroughs build on results from preclinical studies. Medical research requires these two legs to stand on, and neither is more important than the other. What matters is whether a research project delivers interesting results, not whether it is clinical, preclinical or translational.
At the University of Gothenburg we have always had good reasons to be equally proud of our various types of medical research. Clinical research has an absolutely brilliant tradition. Remember the many innovative pharmaceuticals that the Hässle company developed during the 1970s and 1980s through close collaboration with prominent clinical researchers at Sahlgrenska Academy. And we are still international leaders in several fields. We have also been exceptionally successful in epidemiological research, with a long tradition in cardiovascular epidemiology and longitudinal population studies. And the same can be said of our more basic research, where we count two Nobel Laureates among the faculty’s former professors and where we continue to reap major successes. Not to mention the significance of the titanium implants for both odontology and orthopedics that have come from Gothenburg.
Successful research can be conducted in many different ways. Sometimes it can be an advantage for clinical and preclinical researchers to work together in the same team or research environment, where they can share knowledge and exchange ideas. The Wallenberg Laboratory and Sahlgrenska Cancer Center can be regarded as successful examples of this. At the same time, research has become increasingly international. The optimal partner in a translational collaboration does not always happen to be in Gothenburg and can be elsewhere in the world. And we should also bear in mind that researchers continually communicate with each other by publishing their results. A preclinical observation in Ottawa may provide incentive for a clinical study in Odense. And a clinical observation in Grenoble can influence the direction of a preclinical project in Gothenburg. All links in the translational chain, from basic scientific discovery to clinical implementation, rarely occur within the same research team.
While we may be putting behind us the question of what type of research is most important, we soon will need to decide how to meet our current and future needs for facilities. Should we reorganize the faculty so that we have more translational environments where clinical and preclinical researchers work together? Or is it more appropriate to ensure that we have functional facilities for clinical research closer to patients and maintain strong basic research environments at Medicinareberget? And how much importance should we place on having researching teaching staff in the vicinity of teaching facilities and students?
The overriding answer of Sahlgrenska Academy’s management to these questions is that the individual research teams need to be able to determine the environments where they want to be located as much as possible. In some areas the creation of translational environments may be the right way to go. In others, we may need to streamline the facilities to allow more purely clinical or preclinical activities, preserving the existing subject-based structure. But whatever direction is taken should be governed by the wishes of the institutes and departments rather than Faculty Management.
Facility questions are relevant for medicine, odontology and nursing, as well as organizations around Per Dubbsgatan and those at Östra and Mölndal hospitals. The medical system is planning extensive new construction for advanced research as part of the Sahlgrenska Life project, and the ambitious investment in a Life Science cluster near Astra Zeneca (the GoCo project) also offers interesting opportunities for researchers at Sahlgrenska Academy. At the same time, research and teaching facilities at Östra Hospital will be improved and renovated.
New buildings with modern laboratories may be required in some cases to maintain our scientific competitiveness. But the faculty also needs to identify whether our current facilities are used optimally and consider whether renovation or relocation of certain activities can resolve some of our facility needs more cost-effectively. We can learn from experience from other universities, where expansive new construction has led in some cases to rents so high that research teams have had difficulty managing it financially. We have a responsibility here, especially to younger researchers and future ones, who will be stuck with the bill once new construction is completed. And we should also ensure that our facilities continue to be functional in the future, when current networks and constellations of researchers and current research orientations have been replaced by new ones.
Against this backdrop, Sahlgrenska Academy intends to use the spring to draw up a plan for provision of facilities. Anders Oldfors, former head of the Institute of Biomedicine, is heading this effort. He will be conducting interviews with the leaderships of the departments and Core Facilities. This work also includes a survey of the research teams, who will be asked if they are satisfied with their current facilities, where they would otherwise prefer to move their operations and to what extent they would be able to accept the rent increase or closer quarters that new construction might entail. In parallel with this process, the University of Gothenburg vice-chancellor has also appointed Karolinska Institutet’s former vice-chancellor, Harriet Wallberg, to review the university’s overall direction in the Life Science area, with special focus on our important collaborations with Region Västra Götaland and other stakeholders. When these processes are completed shortly after the summer, we hope to have the information we need to make decisions about construction, renovation and relocation projects.
Agneta Holmäng
