Flagship Research Projects
APC has secured funding for a number of additional significant research projects that are aligned with its strategic objectives and global challenge aims.
These include:
- RU Mining - a €2M joint project funded by Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and the New Zealand Ministry of Primary Industries to address the challenge of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from pasture-based livestock systems to help meet the climate goals of both countries.
- The MiMIC project which commenced in 2018 to identify the gut bacteria that are missing or depleted in infants born by Caesarean section or who have been exposed to antibiotics, with the aim of developing microbiome-based solutions to benefit infant health and development. The €6.3M study is co-funded by DuPont Nutrition and Biosciences and Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) through the SFI Spokes Programme (19/SP/6989). The study is led by APC Microbiome Ireland researchers at the Teagasc Food Research Centre in Moorepark, in collaboration with University College Cork and Cork University Maternity Hospital.
Six prestigious ERC Awards secured in the past 5 years:
- Dr Hilary Browne has been awarded €1.5m under the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant programme to lead a major study at the APC on spore forming gut bacteria as a tool to target harmful pathogens.
- Piotr Kowalski was awarded €1.5m for CIRCLE, a project developing cutting-edge circular RNA technology and new delivery methods to tackle unmet medical challenges such as sepsis, which is responsible for one in five deaths worldwide.
- Maria Aburto was awarded €1.75m for RADIOGUT, a project investigating how our gut microbiome communicates with the brain by looking at development pre and post birth which could have ground-breaking implications for precision medicine and neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism.
- Dr Andrey Shkoporov was awarded a presitigious ERC Consolidator Grant of almost €2M to study how bacteriophages (viruses that are harmless to humans and infect bacteria) facilitate communication and exchange of genetic information between bacteria.
- Investigator Prof Ines Thiele who has been awarded a €2 million European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant to spearhead the transformative project AVATAR which models human metabolism and will propel advancements in personalised medicine by predicting the optimal health interventions for individuals, based on their own health data.
- Professor Paul Ross, who is the first researcher based at UCC to secure an ERC Advanced Award, has received funding of €2.3 million for a project entitled BACtheWINNER to investigate viable alternatives to antibiotics.
Other flagship research projects include:
- SFI Spokes projects: Gut Phageomics, Gut Inflammation, BacTrans, Microbe Mom
- SFI Professorship projects:
- EU projects:
