Collaboration across borders and sectors more important than ever

12 March 2020

Guest columnist: Professor Ole Petter Ottersen, President of Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm

Whilst it is always difficult to make meaningful comparisons between different countries, it is easy to see what British and Swedish healthcare systems have in common. In both countries the healthcare sectors are characterised by and rely on close collaborations between academia, healthcare providers, industries and patient organisations for development and improvements. As a leading European university, we know that scientific and medical breakthroughs don’t happen in a vacuum: they are born from the exchange and incremental development of ideas through cross-sectoral and cross-border collaborations.

Karolinska Institutet is a driving force in realising Sweden’s potential in life science. Embedded in our vision is a wish to bring together and forge stronger links with world leading public and private actors – many of which are found in the UK. We take pride in the fact that we have longstanding collaborations with top universities in the UK, including the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, Imperial, UCL and King’s College in London and the universities in Manchester, York and Edinburgh. Since 2015, close to 5000 scientific publications have emanated from collaborations between Karolinska Institutet and UK. Swedish-British partnerships are pioneering medical research in a broad spectrum of disciplines including oncology, psychiatry and neurology, and in a range of topics within the realms of communicable and non-communicable diseases.

Karolinska Institutet successfully cooperates with several pharmaceutical companies. One of our most important partners is Swedish-British AstraZeneca. Established in 2013, the Karolinska Institutet/AstraZeneca Integrated Cardio Metabolic Centre (KI-AZ ICMC) represents an opportunity for our academic scientists to collaborate and work with scientists in the pharmaceutical industry. The aim is to create next generation medicines for cardiovascular and metabolic diseases.

Cross-border and cross-sector collaborations are required to improve the health of people all over the world and to build sustainable healthcare systems. From my different vantage points – as a scientist working with distinguished colleagues in the UK, through my long standing engagement in the European Research Council, and now in my capacity as university President – I have seen how the UK serves as a fulcrum in these collaborative efforts. I am convinced that the UK will maintain and strengthen its role in medical research, no matter what happens after Brexit. The drive towards excellent research and innovation is simply too strong to be restrained by politics. There is no doubt: new and creative solutions for international collaborations will be found in the ecopolitical landscape of post-Brexit Europe. Karolinska Institutet is set to help develop such solutions.

My vision is that precision medicine will serve as a major and irresistible unifier in the years to come. In the cancer field we now see how the power of our own immune system can be harnessed for new therapy, and we see how diagnostics increasingly move into the realms of molecular biology and artificial intelligence. Simply put; medicine is experiencing a transformation that will require and stimulate collaboration across disciplines and sectors. Patients will push for these new opportunities and health providers will embrace them if the costs allow. A major challenge in all this is access to –and sharing of – patient and health data. “Big data” is a key resource that must be handled like any other resource – with due attention to ethics and security. Innovative use of such data is likely to be key to the further development of UK/KI collaborations.

After Brexit we will do whatever we can to uphold our collaborative links with Britain and to establish new ones. With our recent investments in research infrastructure, new technologies and health data we have an excellent starting point.

SCC member Karolinska Institutet is one of the world’s leading medical universities. As a university, KI is Sweden’s single largest centre of medical academic research and offers the country’s widest range of medical courses and programmes. Since 1901 the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has selected the Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine.