"PhD students are trained to work for the whole, beyond their own personal interests”, says Henrik Engblom, senior physician and adjunct professor at Skåne University Hospital.
He has recently returned to Lund University after a couple of years as a professor at the Karolinska Institute. In addition to family reasons, it was the group and the leadership that made him return. In the late 1990s, he was one of four doctoral students in the research group that Håkan Arheden had recently started after his postdoc stay at the University of California at San Francisco. Today, the group has grown to include about forty active members, including physicians, biomedical technologists, engineers, mathematicians, and physiotherapists, as well as a large number of master's students who work in the group annually.
Learning the power of teamwork
“An important part of the PhD education is learning to understand the power of teamwork. To learn to seek synergies with other doctoral students and other research groups.”
The group actively works with recurring reflections to create trust among the members. As a complement to the regular research meetings, the group therefore meets every Friday for an hour and a half of reflection.
According to Henrik Engblom, trust is a central part of constructive collaborations between colleagues and between research groups.
“You have to ensure a win-win before going into a collaboration and not be driven solely by your own interests when using others' resources.”
Better treatments
The ability to collaborate has been a success factor for the group. As an example, he highlights the collaboration between Clinical Physiology and Cardiology, which has led to international multi-center studies on cooling treatment of patients with acute myocardial infarction. This came about after pilot studies in Lund.
“By combining cardiology expertise on the treatment of acute myocardial infarction with clinical physiological knowledge on MR imaging of myocardial infarction, the first cooling treatment study in Lund could be initiated.”
Other collaborations, between researchers at Lund University and Lund University of Technology, have among other things led to the replacement of open heart surgery and subsequent care in the intensive care unit in certain cases with much smaller and simpler procedures and the avoidance of intensive care for children with severe congenital heart defects. In addition, a clinical 3D printing center has been created that can print organs in various materials both for implantation and for planning of surgical procedures.
Investing in research
The fact that Skåne University Hospital has received international attention as the first hospital in Europe to install an MRI scanner specifically for heart diagnostics is, according to Henrik Engblom, due to the will to progress and the willingness of the hospital management to invest in research.
"The idea is that clinical research should benefit the patients. Without clinical research, there is no university hospital."
The close contacts between academia and the clinic made the investment in the MR scanner possible.
"Instead of replacing a gamma camera with a new gamma camera, we suggested that the hospital management should invest in an MRI scanner with the possibility of new diagnostic methods for new patient groups. The background to this new diagnostic method of the heart muscle's microcirculation was a collaboration between the cardiac MR group in Lund and the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, USA. This collaboration enabled the first ever validation of this new technique in patients. This technique is now used in routine clinical practice in Lund," he says.