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Ireland's spirited research and development environment has delivered a host of benefits to the life sciences sector. For academic researchers, surely one of the most congenial has been a greater opportunity for collaboration with their peers.
On the campus of Dublin City University, in a bustling Northside suburb of the capital, an innovative institute is showing just how those partnerships can work. The Biomedical Diagnostics Institute, set up in 2005 with €16.5 million ($30 million US) from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), is a collaborative effort on the part of four major players in Irish biomedicine.
The institute aims to deliver new diagnostic tools to the clinic by bringing together the National Center for Sensor Research at Dublin City University, the National Center for Biomedical Engineering Science at the National University of Ireland Galway, the Tyndall National Institute in Cork, and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, in Dublin.
"We are trying to integrate all the relevant scientific disciplines and all the key applications - clinical, academic, and educational - to produce working prototype platforms for our industrial partners," says Brian MacCraith, director of the Biomedical Diagnostic Institute. "For example, having the Royal College of Surgeons as a major partner has brought in the Clinical Research Center at Beaumont Hospital, allowing us to get the context and definition of what's needed from the coalface."
The institute also receives funding for education and outreach from the Wellcome Trust and Atlantic Philanthropies, which was set up by Chuck Feeney, a billionaire Irish-American. Industrial partners in Ireland, Sweden, and the United States contribute the time of their researchers to the value of €6.5 million ($10.2 million US). "Our industry partners supply their funding by placing researchers with us, and we now have nine or ten at a time here," says MacCraith. "It has created an important new dynamic and a different form of partnership."
Researchers at the institute are working on a range of areas, such as bimolecular recognition, transduction science, and signal-amplification science, led by three different Dublin City University professors; functional diagnostics in platelet biology led by a Royal College of Surgeons professor; and microfluidic platforms led by a professor at Dublin City University/University College Berkeley.
Centers of excellence
In the 1980s and 1990s, when Irish government funding for research was decidedly less abundant than it is now, universities tended to limit their cooperation to institutes in other European Union countries, as a way of attracting EU funding. At home, they usually had to compete with other universities for sparse government funding.
Now, although that competition clearly still exists, there is a notable trend towards teamwork. "The scientific reason [for the trend]," says Frank Gannon, director general of Science Foundation Ireland, "is that the time when individuals could work on their own is gone: There is a need to work with others who will complement your skills, for example a researcher could be good with proteins but not with DNA." There is also the policy direction coming from the Higher Education Authority. "The message gets out fast that there is funding for cooperation."
The Biomedical Diagnostics Institute is one of nine Centers for Science, Engineering and Technology that have been funded by SFI in recent years. To be successful in winning Foundation funding, the centers need to demonstrate considerable cooperation between universities, and between universities and industry.
Meanwhile, the Foundation is fostering its cooperative goals from another angle, providing significant funding to create Strategic Research Clusters that help link scientists and engineers across academia and industry.
In December last year, for example, the Solid State Pharmaceutical Cluster began at the University of Limerick. With professor Kieran Hodnett of the university's Materials and Surface Science Institute as lead principal investigator, the cluster is focused on designing solid-state pharmaceuticals in the physical and chemical forms needed to meet the requirements of advanced formulation and drug delivery systems. The coprincipal investigators are based in Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, University College Cork and the National University of Ireland Galway, and there are nine pharmaceutical company partners.
"We have complementary strengths," says Hodnett. "Trinity is focusing on pharmaceutics, University College Dublin on chemical engineering, Cork on crystal engineering, Galway on analytical methods, and Limerick on crystallization."
Training together
Universities are also beginning to cooperate in producing the skilled scientists needed to fuel Ireland's knowledge economy. Trinity College Dublin and University College Cork, for example, have come together to create an innovative international PhD program in systems microbiology, with a pilot program taking off last October. "It's a groundbreaking program, utilizing complementary expertise, with our core activities quite similar," says Fergal O'Gara, a professor at University College Cork.
Students in the course spend their first year in laboratories in both Cork and Trinity. Cork supplies modules on interactions between microorganisms and their hosts, with its School of Mathematics and Computer Science working on the computational side. "Trinity's input is particularly strong in bioinformatics and functional genomics, and there are also areas where we are both providing input," says O'Gara.
In late April this year, Ireland's academic cooperation took yet another path, with the establishment of a charitable company to coordinate the health research activities of University College Cork, National University of Ireland Galway, University College Dublin, Trinity College, and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.
The company, Molecular Medicine Ireland (MMI), is an extension of former Dublin Molecular Medicine Center, and aims to build on the biomedical research strengths of each institution, to accelerate the translation of science into diagnostics, drugs, and devices. "Molecular Medicine Ireland creates a critical mass of expertise and infrastructure in medical research," says Mike Kamarck, executive vice president of Wyeth, who chairs MMI.
The Higher Education Authority funds the new endeavor. Launching the company, science and education minister Mary Hanafin praised the foresight of the heads of the five institutions. "Molecular Medicine Ireland will assist the institutions to build a sustainable system of world class teams in biomedical research."