From Left: Luke O'Neill, Cliona O'Farrelly, and Kingston Mills

© ej carr/ www.ejcphoto.com

Trinity College Dublin is ranked second in the world in immunology research. For the immunologists at Trinity (TCD), a relatively small university in a very small country, that's an astonishing achievement.

The accolade comes from the magazine, Lab Times, in which the number of citations per paper produced was analyzed. The Dublin team, surpassed only by Switzerland, also holds nine of the top 10 most highly cited papers in immunology in Ireland.

Leading this formidable band of researchers are the "trio from Trinity": Luke O'Neill, head of the School of Biochemistry and Immunology and one of the best-known names in the field internationally; biochemistry professor Kingston Mills, and Cliona O'Farrelly, chair of comparative immunology.

The three are interlinked in several ways. O'Neill and Mills are two of the three academics who cofounded the biotechnology company, Opsona. Mills and O'Farrelly both did their immunology doctorates a year apart in the 1970s and have been research collaborators, as have been Mills and O'Neill.

"No one had done a PhD in immunology when we started PhDs at TCD," recalls Mills. "It was a very new thing to do." He almost didn't go into science at all. "I was a serious athlete. At one point, it was a toss up between physical education or science at Trinity," he says. "When I really looked at what would keep my interest up for life, I chose science, and I'm so glad I did."

Both Mills and O'Farrelly recall "a steep learning curve," working in near-isolation on doctorates with little of the structure and support that is the norm in academia now. Both left the country soon after completing their degrees. Mills went to Britain and O'Farrelly went to Britain and then America, where she lectured in biology at Harvard University.

O'Neill had left the country for Britain to do his PhD, earning his doctorate from the University of London. He then served as a postdoctorate fellow at Cambridge University before returning to Ireland to take up a lectureship at Trinity in 1991.

This typical route for Irish researchers occurred in the 1970s through the early 1990s. By pursuing any postgraduate work in Ireland at the time, students effectively educated themselves beyond any job offering in an economically struggling country still heavily reliant on agriculture and manufacturing for jobs. "There was absolutely no prospect of a job here," recalls Mills. "Even coming back here in 1993 was a huge risk at the time. It was grim on all fronts."

"There was a constant theme of 'we can't compete,'" says O'Farrelly. That began to change in the late 1990s and postmillennium, when the Irish government made enormous commitments to funding science and technology.

Curiously, however, all three returned to work in Ireland before the appearance of the new boom economy. O'Farrelly says she returned partly because she went to one of the early presentations on this new thinking about science and was convinced that a change was coming. Mills had no such hopes, but he was eventually able to get an academic position at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, before leaping at the chance of a job in Dublin. "I had waited for the opportunity to get into TCD and came in 2001, the beginning of the growth here in immunology," Mills says.

"When Kingston [Mills] came, then the critical mass began," says O'Farrelly. Adds Mills: "I brought my research people over, and we suddenly started to create something."

The trio says it's strange to have started initially in a poorly understood field that has now become hugely popular with students and gained such a high profile among researchers. "In the past 20 years, immunology has emerged as an important science," says O'Farrelly. Mills says this has occurred in part because immunology has a visible impact in healthcare. Immunological research is generating many new drugs and will continue to do so. "What's going to happen," says Mills, "is a whole host of drugs are going to emerge to treat conditions we don't even think of as being immunological problems."

This is an area that truly excites them. "What's changed is the understanding of the link between inflammation and immunology," says O'Farrelly. Immune systems have evolved to deal with constant challenges, O'Farrelly notes, but in modern hyperclean home and work environments, we've sanitized away the immune system's usual employment. Perhaps, seeking something to do, it attacks the body, producing a wide array of strange and painful autoimmune conditions. The problem is likely compounded by all the chemicals we are exposed to in our daily environment, she adds.

These problems intrigue all three researchers, and their research revolves around these issues. O'Farrelly has done research into the role of the liver, which turns out to have an important immunological function, she says. O'Neill and Mills' work on Toll-like receptors and regulatory T cells underlies two potential drugs, OPN101 and OPN201, from Opsona. They say these drugs might be able to tackle immune conditions such as multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease, and Crohn's disease.

"They are an interesting mix of different characters and an outstanding scientific group," says Frank Gannon, director of Science Foundation Ireland. "They also act as an anchor in attracting excellent researchers and students to Ireland."