Before we turn to this issue, I want to share one very happy piece of news.
MEDICUS has been recognised at the APEX Awards, with our In Conversation With series being singled out for its excellence. As Editor-in-Chief, I am enormously proud, not simply because awards are nice to receive, but because this one recognises the care, curiosity and collective effort that go into making the magazine worth reading.
It is also a useful reminder that recognition brings responsibility. Once someone calls your work award-winning, you have to keep earning it.
And with that happy pressure hanging over us, let us turn our attention to this issue.
While looking for stock images that capture this issue’s theme, I entered the term “ecosystem” into the search bar.
What came back was a wonderfully confused assortment of forests, coral reefs, green buildings, hands holding seedlings, glowing digital networks and the inevitable corporate diagram with arrows going everywhere.
It made me wonder: what does the word “ecosystem” actually mean to different people? And when we use it in an academic institution, do we mean anything more than a convenient way of describing many programmes, partners and people at once?
As I edited the stories in this issue of MEDICUS, the answer became increasingly clear.
An ecosystem is not simply what surrounds us. It is how we work.
At Duke-NUS Medical School, discovery rarely belongs to one lab or discipline. It moves between scientists and clinicians, classrooms and communities, students and mentors, Singapore and the wider world. Our success comes from the ecosystem we have built with our partners, and from the people who keep it alive: researchers, educators, clinician-scientists, paediatricians, innovators, students, alumni, regulators, industry collaborators and communities.
In our lead story, Dean Patrick Tan, Prof Sheemei Lok, Chris Laing, Deidre Anne De Silva and others help us see how research, education, innovation and patient care come together across Duke-NUS and the SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Centre. Not as separate institutional ambitions, but as parts of the same journey from a question to discovery, and from discovery to impact.
That same idea runs through the rest of the issue.
Professor Robert Califf and Professor John Lim remind us that regulation should not appear only at the end of innovation, when a new product or therapy is ready for approval. It belongs much earlier, helping scientists understand what evidence is needed and how a promising idea can reach patients safely.
Professor Scott Compton, Professor Salvatore Albani and colleagues make a similar case but for education. If scientists and clinicians are expected to translate discoveries into better care, then translational thinking cannot begin only after their formal training is complete.
Assistant Professor Bipin Bhola asks future clinician-innovators to spend less time falling in love with their first solution and more time understanding the problem. Through Camp Simba and Paediatric Brain and Solid Tumour Awareness or
PBSTA Day, our students learn that caring for patients also means understanding what illness does to families, childhoods and everyday life.
Duke-NUS alum from Class of 2017, Dr Brian Chan’s journey into neurosurgery reminds us that careers do not always follow the route we imagined. Sometimes, a different door opens onto the same calling.
Beyond the School, ADWANCE-Asia shows how wastewater surveillance becomes useful only when scientific capability, public health systems and regional partnerships work together. Our stories from Duke University, NUS and SingHealth show the same principle in different forms: knowledge becomes more powerful when it can cross institutional boundaries.
And in our People section, Assistant Professor and Assistant Dean Anissa Widjaja’s International Visitor Leadership Program journey captures another part of an ecosystem that is easy to overlook. She travelled expecting to learn about innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership. What stayed with her most were the relationships: the conversations, introductions and friendships that may continue creating possibilities long after the programme itself has ended.
Some of the most important connections in academic life begin quietly. A clinician says, “I keep seeing this problem in my patients.” A scientist replies, “We may have a way to study it.” A mentor introduces two people who would otherwise would never have met. A student asks a question that shifts how an established team sees its work.
None of this fits neatly into an organisational chart. Perhaps that is what being “different by design” really means. Not being different for the sake of it, but designing a medical school where people, ideas and disciplines can move more freely towards a shared purpose.
Of course, ecosystems do not thrive automatically. They require trust, generosity and a willingness to share ideas, opportunities and credit. They depend on institutions knowing when to lead, when to convene and when to recognise that someone else may hold an important part of the answer.
Duke-NUS may be a relatively small medical school, but our reach has never depended on size alone. It comes from the strength of our connections and what becomes possible when those connections are put to work.
So perhaps the stock images were not entirely wrong.
An ecosystem can be a forest, a coral reef or a network of glowing lines. But for us, it is something more human: people finding one another, bringing different strengths to the same problem and helping ideas travel further than they could alone.
Enough said! Dear, reader, I wish you happy reading.
Anirudh Sharma
Editor-in-Chief, MEDICUS