Take a stroll inside SAHMRI
Every Friday, locals have the chance to wander through SAHMRI to see what goes on inside. Here’s what happens on those tours.
ONCE the electric cylinder doors curve open, the first thing to do is look up.
Look up at the large white panels and smooth curves as the sunlight streams through those renowned triangular windows, all 15,000 of them.
Look up at the white spiral staircase that is often compared to the staircase at Guggenheim Museum in New York and resembles a giant strand of DNA. Look up as the lifts fly between floors with a gentle swoosh.
The picture seems very … futuristic.
And it is the future. Since its 2013 opening, the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI) has been home to about 600 medical researchers; the brains that could be behind the next major medical breakthrough.
The foyer is quiet today, but once the Royal Adelaide Hospital opens it will be a bustling shared plaza where doctors and researchers constantly cross paths, sharing ideas and resources.
This patch of North Tce will be the biggest medical precinct in the southern hemisphere – and it’s ours.
Sophie Perri joined a public tour to learn how SAHMRI works.
Inside SAHMRI
FOR anyone who has gazed at the prickly-looking SAHMRI building on North Tce and wondered what happens inside, the answers are within reach. Every Friday, local folk can satisfy their curiosity by hopping on a public tour, which 15,000 people have done since SAHMRI started the program three years ago.
About 20 of us are here for today’s session. It feels like a school excursion, only no-one is here by obligation. Everyone has a different reason for coming, but one theme underlies it all – curiosity.
Friends Carol, Kay and Lynne have taken advantage of their day off work to finally see what the inside of the “cheese grater” looks like. All work in the medical field – Carol and Kay are midwives, Lynne is in medical education – and are fascinated with what’s happening within the building.
“It’s beautiful,” Kay says.
“Even friends of ours in Germany have seen photos of it, so it’s well known internationally, apparently.”
For others, like Shaun Lane, the motivation is political.
“I just wanted to see the research and what the government is doing with their money,” he says.
“Hopefully I’ll be reassured they’re doing the right thing.”
At this point our tour guide, India Wallace, gathers us for a rundown on the building’s architectural story. She’s a calming soul – I later find out she’s a meditation teacher and counsellor to cancer patients – and knows the spiel well, having conducted these tours for two years.
She tells us the inspiration behind the exterior (the skin of a pinecone, not a cheese grater) and explains how the award-winning building by Woods Bagot came in pieces. “It was like building a Meccano set,” she says.
There are still areas being built. She takes us past the construction site of what will become the biomedical services area, where patients will go for CAT scans, MRIs and X-rays.
There are plans for a SAHMRI 2, which will be about 10 stories high and house the nation’s first proton therapy unit, which targets inoperable cancers. There is also talk of the Women’s and Children’s Hospital coming over to join the RAH and the medical school.
Past news reports show the government is committed to shifting WCH to the site by 2023 at a minimum cost of $600m, but no money has been allocated. As for SAHMRI 2, the State Government has committed $44m and Flinders Uni has pledged $60m, but they still need $176m from the Federal Government.
The building we stand in today comes from government funding – $200m from the Commonwealth, $15m from the state. SAHMRI gets about $5m per annum but hopes to eventually support itself.
“Most people think that we’re a government building – we’re actually not,” Wallace says.
“We are a not-for-profit charity and we’re a private business. We are supported by government because of the nature of what we do. The government gives about $5m a year to keep running costs going, but the aim is to make products and therapies that can be sold, meaning the institute can support itself.”
Wallace asks who knew about SAHMRI before the North Tce building opened in 2013. Only a few hands go up – still more than she thought would.
“We used to be situated on King William St over by ANZ and in 2007 there was a review done, and this review showed that SA was losing a lot of grant money interstate, so we were only sitting on about five per cent of the national grants coming through which was really disturbing to the SA government and SA Health,” she says.
“We’ve always had a strong science background in Adelaide so there were many meetings and they got together with SAHMRI.
“Some of the microscopes we have are worth thousands and thousands of dollars, and they might have been sitting in a lab somewhere with five people using them. Whereas bringing all these groups in together is an economic way of working and everybody can share each other’s equipment, not to mention the knowledge that is shared.”
That open-plan environment initially took some getting used to for “introverted scientists” but they have since acclimatised to the new model, Wallace says. “No one has their own office. Even director Steve Wesselingh sits out on the floor,” she adds, before we hop in the lift.
We ride up to level eight – the business and marketing floor. There on the walls we see the building’s first splash of colour, a bright yellow that Wallace says was inspired by Aboriginal elders’ description of the land.
Aboriginal health is one of the Institute’s seven key health themes – the others are cancer, heart health, nutrition and metabolism, mind and brain, infection and community and healthy mothers, babies and children.
Half of the 46 researchers working in Aboriginal health are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders themselves. The team is working on a major research project investigating the factors that raise the chances of developing Type 2 diabetes.
We don’t get to visit the underground floors which are devoted to a gym, carpark, animal lab – “we have mice and rats and always use them as a last resort and we work very closely with the RSPCA”, Wallace says – and cyclotron, which has been in operation for about 17 months. The $4m machine creates radioactive isotopes from glucose sugars which direct doctors to the precise location of cancers.
Level seven is where all the cancer researchers work in the labs, and it’s our next stop.
Behind the glass marked with cautionary stickers (no food, no phones) we see a few people in lab coats wandering by the bright green shelves, lined with microscopes and beakers and other important looking science equipment. Facing the windows is the open-plan office, lined with small, square desks with low partitions.
It’s much quieter than we expect, but because researchers have 24 hour access this is not your average 9-5 workplace.
As a heavy door slams and echoes throughout the silent floor, a PhD student comes by to chat to us. He’s young, casually dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, his hair pulled up in a small ponytail. His name is Ben Leow, and the passion he has for his research is evident from the second he starts talking.
Put very simply, he’s researching the resistance of leukaemic cells to current targeted chemotherapies.
“There’s a room at the back where we have a whole bunch of gene sequencing equipment, so it allows us to read the DNA of the cells line by line and we can then perform genetic analysis on single cells – it allows us to get a deep understanding of the variation between the cells,” he says.
Leow says working within SAHMRI gives PhD students a chance to mingle with esteemed researchers.
“There’s a lot of us little kids running around,” he says with a laugh.
As Leow returns to work and we head down the stairs, Wallace tells us about the gene sequencing equipment.
“We were really lucky. We had a personal donor (David Gunn) give us $2m for that suite. It’s not the usual thing you’d have at an institute. So it’s very philanthropic.”
As we near the end of the tour, we briefly stop at the cafe, where a few small groups and pairs are chatting over coffee. Stacks of medical journals replace the standard newspapers and lifestyle magazines usually seen at city cafes.
The cafe is what Wallace calls “the hub” of the building. “I think food and coffee always brings people together,” she says. “It’s the meeting place.”
Back on ground level, we’re asked to make a donation to the Institute on the way out – these donations have raised about $20,000 for SAHMRI so far.
Two women from the Adelaide Convention Centre, who came today to “scope out their neighbour”, are full of praise.
“We speak to a lot of people about attracting a lot of medical conferences in to SA so we’ve worked hand in hand with SAHMRI for a number of years,” one says.
“To know so much is happening on our doorstep is unbelievable,” says the other.
Meanwhile Shaun, who had reservations about the place an hour ago, leaves feeling reassured.
“I didn’t know it was an independent institute,” he says. “I thought it had a lot more to do with SA Health.
“It’s amazing to see something this modern and functional in Adelaide.”
The future is looking up.