Development of the First Faculty of Medicine is Strategic But Also Atempora
In our day and age, when almost all attention focuses on one single subject, the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, the notion of speaking about our faculty’s development may seem inappropriate. Readers may well ask why this issue is not dedicated solely to the current situation linked to the new type of coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. I will try to address this concern using one concrete and timely example. When the programme of the BIOCEV project was being developed, our faculty was the only one to include in the proposal a laboratory for work with highly contagious agents. After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, BIOCEV was one of the first academic institutions to participate in patient testing. It was able to increase the much-needed testing capacity by several hundred samples a day. Without a lab for work with highly contagious material, where preparation of the biological material could take place, BIOCEV, despite the excellent facilities of all its other laboratories, would not have been able to get involved in the testing.
When BIOCEV was being built, none of us could have foreseen the emergencies of recent weeks and months. We did, however, believe it would be appropriate to include in the development project of our faculty also something extra, something going beyond the standard facilities, something that at the time was not a hot priority, but absence of this element would have prevented us from taking a particular direction in future. I am not glad to see that this foresight was proven right, but I am very happy that thanks to this, we were now able to help in such an important way.
This is part of the reason why I believe that the subject of development of the faculty deserves attention even now. Given the fact that the term of the current management will soon be ending, I take the liberty of viewing this article as a sort of overview of situation during under our leadership.
Recent Past
The previous programming period of EU funds, 2007–2013, brought about a factual exclusion of Prague from competing for large investment subsidies for infrastructure because Prague was deemed a rich region. A small consolation came in the form of creation of several centres in the immediate vicinity of Prague. Still, the proportion of subsidies that came here clearly did not correspond to the number and size of scientific and research institutions in Prague in comparison to the rest of the country, where various centres were built left and right at the cost of billions of CZK. Even so, our faculty managed to win in less richly funded programmes projects worth up to dozens of millions of CZK, which had importantly contributed to its development. Let us name for instance the Research Laboratory of Cellular Biology and Metabolomics or the Imaging Centre for Biomedicine and Medical Nanotechnologies. Moreover, right from the start, we became involved in the abovementioned BIOCEV project, i.e. the Biotechnology and Biomedicine Centre of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and the Charles University in Vestec, near Prague.
By now, BIOCEV is considered a highly successful project, both generally and on a governmental level. Preparations and implementation of the project were demanding, complications and doubts numerous, but the project is a success. This much is evident from the results of scientific work conducted there and from the number of grants our groups managed to successfully compete for there (almost 20% of scientific grants at the faculty by volume including four PRIMUS projects). After all, BIOCEV ranks among the top within the entire programme of Centres of Excellence and it already has a good name not only domestically but also abroad.
When at the end of the programming period the Ministry of Education made some remaining funds available via an investment call also to Prague, we used that opportunity and won two projects in total volume of 150 million CZK for further improvement of instrumental facilities and technologies. The larger and more compact of these projects was the Centre for Advanced Preclinical Imaging (CAPI), thanks to which our faculty acquired a centre with internationally unique capabilities of preclinical imaging. In the subsequent years, the equipment of CAPI had thanks to its involvement in national infrastructure further developed, so that by now, the centre can be compared with the best comparable institutions worldwide.
Thanks to the Department of Strategic Development, the faculty acquired over half a billion CZK over five years
We entered the EU programming period 2014–2020 with clear goals: to win at least 250 million CZK, whereby 500 million CZK would be considered a success. Experiences from previous years indicated that an ‘amateur’ approach to preparation of project applications by their future lead researchers, albeit with the support of excellently functioning departments of the Dean’s Office, significantly lowers their chances of success. The key element that can often make crucial difference is an administrative manager of a project who understands the language of people who issued the call. Such person can then can translate the call to the scientists, coordinate the preparation of all requisite application parts, which range from a formulation of the content of the project as such through personnel issues and budget all the way to public tenders and creation of indicators, unite all these elements, and compose the final form of the application. This idea was confirmed by examples of institutions which had such an apparatus and clearly benefitted from it.
This is why we included into the administration of the faculty a new Department of Strategic Development, which gradually, thanks to an increasing number of projects, grew into the current four-person, excellently functioning team. In the beginning, we still used the services of some external specialists in EU projects but in recent years, all work with application preparation and subsequent implementation of successful applications takes place fully within the faculty. Quality of our administrative apparatus is attested by, e.g., the Mobility project, which runs at the entire Charles University. It helped facilitate working internships of our employees abroad and arrivals of international specialists to our faculty. In this project, we managed to prepare basically all of the administrative guidelines at our faculty (since supervising organs did not provide it) and these guidelines were later adopted by other faculties of the Charles University.
Over five years of functioning, the Department of Strategic Development – naturally in collaboration with other departments of the Dean’s Office whose contribution one should not forget – had prepared or participated in the preparation of almost fifty project applications for EU funds. Our faculty won as the principal researcher or co-researcher a total of twenty-two projects and one is currently being assessed. The total amount allotted to these projects reached 512 million CZK for the First Faculty of Medicine.
It must, however, be stressed that these funds do not come for free. European projects require applicant’s financial participation, which tends to represent about 5% of total costs. This fact, in conjunction with obligatory sustainability of projects as presented in the application for another five years after the end of subsidised operation, is one of the key factors why we were so careful about the number of projects we would apply to, which calls we would apply into, and how much resources we would apply for.
Centre of Tumour Ecology
If we were to select just one project that deserves special attention, it would be the Centre of Tumour Ecology. The Centre involves several units from our faculty and the Faculty of Science of the Charles University, but also partners from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, and it is headed by Professor Karel Smetana, head of the Institute of Anatomy. Project from call Excellent Research is our largest project from operational programmes and from its total volume of almost 300 million CZK, teams from our faculty receive over one half. Project’s importance and quality were confirmed by success of a follow-up programme of so-called Pre-screening of Strategic Projects or the fact that Doc. Brábek from the Faculty of Sciences, one of participating researchers of the project, received in 2019 the prestigious Czech Head award. I believe it is no accident that the Centre of Tumour Ecology grant was received by an institute that has excellent long-term collaboration with the administrative apparatus of the Dean’s Office in terms of application preparation and implementation but also meeting of deadlines or quality of documents that go into project applications.
Albertov Campus
The Albertov Campus project has been in preparation for a long time and it is such a large subject it would deserve a separate article. Work on building realisation is underway, but since the finance provider still has not finalised the key issue of financing – among other things due to the current epidemiological situation – it is unlikely that actual start of building will take place this summer. Our participation has been consistently, and right from the start, directed towards the creation of a science and research centre of international importance with emphasis on outstanding technological facilities, around which we would concentrate the best of science we have, or rather will have, at our disposal. Our aim is to steer the project towards a format where its dispositions would not be limited by orientation on current specific needs of several particular directions and teams. We want to centre to be open and accessible to in effect any research project and research direction. I am glad to say that in this respect, we seem to be so far successful and the Albertov Campus project is being prepared as a universal and modular centre of modern science.
What did not work out
Like in any undertaking, things do not always work out, which is why a list of things that did work out should be complemented by an overview of those which did not. We did not manage to acquire a large investment project for improving the quality of education infrastructure of universities, where we asked for over 400 million CZK for technological facilities, especially simulator technologies and other equipment. We managed to partially compensate for this thanks to a very well set-up grant call ‘Nábytek’ (Furniture), where we received 60 million CZK, from which we were able to purchase at least a small part of the originally planned facilities.
The idea of three Prague medical faculties of the Charles University and Medical Emergency Services of the Capital of Prague to build a joint simulation centre focused on postgraduate education of health workers came to naught. We prepared what we believed was a relatively detailed project. After originally positive reaction from the Ministry of Health, various more or less objective objections and complications started to appear and finally, the project was just kind of dropped.
We were very disappointed by Ministry of Health’s initiative Pre-screening of Strategic Projects, which was announced with the aim to select nation-wide strategic project intentions with a European dimension, so that their implementation could start right from the beginning of the following programming period. Of the ten selected projects (fifty were submitted), our faculty was the chief administrator in one (National Centre for the Study of Tumour Diseases) and in others it featured as a partner. The budget for our faculty was almost half a billion CZK. Unfortunately, the programme was soon after the announcement of results cancelled by the Council for Research, Development, and Innovation without any explanation. Still, even failure is part of life and this was a valuable experience.
We cannot do without excellent teachers and scientists
In conclusion, I would like to offer an evaluation of the previous period from the perspective of faculty development as successful, although only time will show just how successful we were. We managed to acquire a large amount of technological equipment, provide financial support to various activities, and importantly contribute to improving conditions for teaching and research. The faculty now has at its disposal administrative apparatus that can very well prepare and implement projects of various kinds. But whether these commodities bring us benefits, that depends on us, on everyone who works, teaches, and conducts research at the First Faculty of Medicine. Even the best facilities and conditions are largely useless and in vain in absence of great teachers. It is nice to have a racing Ferrari in your garage, but if there is no capable driver to drive it, the car will still lag behind other, weaker cars. It will be just much more costly to run and maintain. At the same time, the current extreme experience reminds us that thorough, well considered development should not be limited to meeting current demands. It should also address potential future needs.
Ivan Mikula, Vice Dean for Faculty Development
Road map of large research infrastructure points in the Czech Republic
The ‘general public’ at our faculty is usually not aware of the fact that our institutes participate in the ‘road map’ of large research infrastructure defined by the Ministry of Education and the Government Council for Research, Development, and Innovation as ‘one of the key elements of the Czech national system of research and innovation’ and an area to which it declared long-term systemic financial support. In the area relevant to us, namely Health and Foodstuffs (i.e. biological and medical sciences), we participate in four out of the total of ten infrastructures:
* BBMRI-CZ – The Bank of Clinical Samples,
* EATRIS – Czech National Hug of the European Infrastructure for Translational Medicine,
* Czech-BioImaging – National Infrastructure for Biological and Medical Imaging,
* NCMG – National Centre of Medical Genomics,
whereby in the last named, we are its main coordinator.
From the faculty’s perspective, this is very important because these infrastructures currently have, within science and research, its own budget chapter which is planned in a long term. These infrastructures are also the target of specific calls from operational programmes, via which we have during this programming period acquired over 100 million CZK, which were allocated mainly to technical facilities.
Ivan Mikula, Vice Dean for Faculty Development