AG&M annual report 2018

“It was tentative at first, trial and error, those guys
across the Amstel were our competitors, now we
had to collaborate, to trust them, we were told
to just go for it.” Such were the birth pangs of the
Amsterdam Gastroenterology & Metabolism (AG&M)
research institute according to co-director Professor
Gerd Bouma. Now, just two years on, Bouma sees it
beginning to work “exquisitely well” with clinicians and
scientists beginning to talk, work, and think together.
“It was tentative at first, trial and
error, those guys across the Amstel
were our competitors, now we had
to collaborate, to trust them, we
were told to just go for it.”
With limited funding or, then, any obvious incentives,
the first step was simply: “to promote a spirit of
common purpose” of identity. Meetings were
deliberately not held at either the AMC or VUmc sites,
but at a third location. Then came the crucial first
annual AG&M meeting or “retreat” the “mainstay of
this Institute” where all scientists and PhD students
present their work. Van de Graaf: “We needed to
hear what everyone was doing, what was their line of
research. We thought we already knew, but in fact we
didn’t know at all.”
“We needed to hear what
everyone was doing, what was their
line of research. We thought we
already knew, but in fact we didn’t
know at all.”
The mission and vision of the AG&M directors
His co-director Dr. Stan van de Graaf - from across
the river - shares his confidence. His sees the AG&M
research institute as “unique” in the Netherlands,
simply for its size, with well over 400 PhD students,
serving an Amsterdam catchment population of
approximately 1 million, and with its dedicated focus
on gastroenterology, metabolism and endocrinology in
one institute. Today, he sees a sense of unity, of being
part of something bigger, of the promise of “special
opportunities” for science, healthcare and patients.
There had been talk of Amsterdam’s University Medical
Center (AMC) and Free University medical centre
(VUmc) merging since 2011. At the beginning of 2017,
it suddenly became real as the two major hospitals’,
culture, politics and ways of organizing science had to
begin to come together. Among many other things,
the challenge was to take the VUmc’s popular research
institutes and to merge this concept with the AMC’s
principal investigator approach. Eight research institutes
finally emerged of which AG&M was one, building
on the former AMC’s research focus on Metabolic/
Endocrine disorders and Gastrointestinal diseases.
This created knowledge, trust, and the belief that “we
can work together”. The first retreat “was a bit intense”,
with a huge number of pitches to introduce the vast
amount of different research topics, but now, the third,
“was really fabulous” says Van de Graaf.
In addition to the annual AG&M retreat, monthly
seminars and symposia were organized while, in this
spirit of collaboration, scientists were encouraged to
attend clinical settings such as multidisciplinary team
meetings to discuss real patients. Collaboration was
also promoted through funding, grants for talented
teams of researchers who could demonstrate a degree
of synergy in their work.
For Professor Bouma, what began was no less than a
change of attitude, of mindset, and from the bottom
up. “Whatever your expertise, the discipline your
working in, you are part of something bigger and we
can benefit from each other.” And more often than not
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