A €7.5 million investment by a French pharmaceutical company in research being undertaken with University College Dublin (UCD) could result in new medicines being developed to treat high blood pressure and heart disease.
The joint venture, announced yesterday, will also result in any treatments which are developed reaching patients more quickly.
The first patients who will benefit initially from any breakthroughs are those being treated in the St Vincent's Hospital Group, Dublin, as well as those attached to some 50 GP practices in the southeast.
The investment by Servier Laboratories in a centre for translational medicine at the UCD Conway Institute will be for a five-year period.
UCD president Dr Hugh Brady said yesterday that the unique partnership presented the real prospect of delivering new diagnostics and therapeutics for very common diseases affecting the Irish population.
"This has the capacity to generate diagnostics and treatments that both give you earlier diagnosis and better treatment of very common diseases.
"So, it's a very exciting initiative for both parties concerned, for both UCD and Servier," he said.
"It links state-of-the-art bench research in the Conway Institute at UCD with clinical research in St Vincent's Hospital," Dr Brady said.
"I think a really important and added dimension is that clinical research branches out into about 50 GP communities in the southeast of Ireland, so it is truly what we would call 'bench to bedside'," he added.
"It does sound high tech, but I think the important thing is it's targeting common diseases . . . this is taking hypertension and cardiovascular disease, which are two of the most common diseases affecting the population, and it has the capacity not just to develop new therapies . . . but I think, importantly, it has the capacity to generate knowledge that will allow us to adjust and to tailor existing therapies to particular types of patients," he said.
Minister for Health Mary Harney, who launched the joint venture, said the patients involved would benefit from the research from very early on.
"I very much welcome the fact that this particular research project is focused on patient care," Ms Harney said.
"Patients will be very involved . . . so it's not just a piece of research hoping to find a discovery, it will be very much linked into what's called translational medicine, which is that what's happening in the laboratory will be directly applied to patient care, and that's certainly very encouraging.
"So, from a very early time, the patients will be benefiting from the research," Ms Harney said.
By bringing the latest therapies for cardiovascular disease from the scientific and pharmaceutical laboratories to the community, the incidence of stroke and heart attack could be reduced among the Irish population by over 50 per cent, those behind the project claim.
Dr Laurent Perret, executive director of research and development at Servier, yesterday said: "The data gathered in Dublin and the research carried out can be fed back into the international effort so that others working on similar diseases can benefit from and compare the findings with their own patient populations."
Last October, Minister for Enterprise Trade and Employment Micheál Martin announced a €184 million expansion by Servier in Ireland, which will lead to the creation of 267 jobs in Kilkenny and Wicklow.