APC News
Recent Funding Successes
Recent Funding Successes
Innovative Training Networks
Dr Cormac Gahan and Dr Brendan Griffin will lead two new Innovative Training Networks (ITN) These new ITNs, which were successful at the evaluation stage and have been invited to participate in preparing the grant agreements worth €5.66m, will provide top-level research and training opportunities for two collaborative PhD Programmes across Europe, coordinated from APC.
Cormac will co-ordinate COL_RES (Colonization Resistance) which will investigate the mechanisms by which the gut microbiota protects against serious foodborne pathogens, including Salmonella, E. coli, Listeria and Campylobacter. This ITN is worth €2.2m in total and will recruit 3 (of the 8) PhD students in the APC.
Brendan will co-ordinate InPharma which aims to eliminate animals from the development of oral drug formulations bringing together leading scientists from 6 multi-national pharmaceutical companies, 5 research institutions and 9 technology and service providers (SMEs).
Irish Corona Virus Sequencing Platform
Prof Paul Cotter and Dr Fiona Crispie have been awarded funding of €378,716 as part of the Irish Government’s newly-established national, coordinated research and innovation response to the COVID-19 pandemic. They will lead the National Coronavirus Sequencing Consortium which will analyse the genetic makeup of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in patient samples in Ireland.
The consortium partners include Teagasc, University College Cork, Cork University Hospital, the National Virus Reference Laboratory, University College Dublin, Beaumont hospital, Genomics Medicine Ireland, Trinity College Dublin/St James’s Hospital, University of Limerick (UL)/University Hospital Limerick, the National University of Ireland, Galway and Maynooth University.
SOPHIA International Obesity Research Consortium
Dr Susan Joyce, Dr Orla O’Sullivan and Dr Harriet Schellekens, have joined 28 other leading partners from civil society, academia and industry from 12 countries to better understand obesity and optimise future treatments. The international, public-private research consortium ‘SOPHIA’, (Stratification of Obese Phenotypes to Optimize Future Obesity Therapy), aims to improve risk assessment of complications of obesity and predict treatment response for people with obesity.
The €16 million in funding for this 5-year project has been granted from the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) and is coordinated by Prof. Carel le Roux, obesity physician at the Diabetes Complications Research Centre at University College Dublin. Silicon Republic.
DISCOVeRIE
Dr Gerard Clarke and Professor John F. Cryan have recently been awarded key research funding under the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme to understand the role of the microbiome and gut-brain axis in irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).
The researchers are partners in the grant ‘Development, dIagnosis and prevention of gender-related Somatic and mental COmorbiditiEs in iRrItable bowel syndrome in Europe’ (DISCOvERIE) which is valued at €6 million overall. The project involves researchers from eight European countries and a number of European SMEs and aims to better diagnose, prevent and treat this common debilitating condition.
