The new €20m clinical research centre, to open at St James's Hospital in Dublin in 2009, will bring basic research quickly into clinical practice, writes Dick Ahlstrom
A new medical research centre to open in Dublin by 2009 has the capacity to make Ireland a leader in medical research and advanced clinical practice. It will bring together leading researchers from Dublin's three medical schools and will allow basic research to transform immediately into improved clinical practice for the patient.
"This is one of the most significant developments in Irish health research in a generation," says Prof Dermot Kelleher, chief executive of the Health Research Board (HRB) at the announcement of the new Wellcome Trust/HRB Clinical Research Centre (CRC).
The two bodies are co-funding the CRC, putting €20 million into the project over the next five years. Wellcome will pay for a new building to be located on the St James's Hospital campus and for the highly specialised research equipment needed by CRC researchers working in the facility. The HRB will fund the running costs over the five-year period, explained CRC director, Prof Dermot Kelleher.
Kelleher is the current head of the medical school at Trinity College Dublin as well as being professor of clinical medicine and a consultant physician at St James.
Importantly the CRC will ally the three Dublin medical schools at Trinity, University College Dublin and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) and their affiliated teaching hospitals, united through the existing Dublin Molecular Medicine Centre, Kelleher explains.
"The centre is a physical location for high quality clinical research," he says. "The application funds a network of researchers across Dublin."
The three schools put forward their proposal for a comprehensive centre for clinical research, and won favour from the two funders. The international scientific advisory committee who assessed the proposal described it as "outstanding, saying that it should be supported as a priority", stated HRB chairman, Prof Desmond Fitzgerald.
"We put forward a pretty ambitious proposal," Kelleher explains. "It puts in place some of the most advanced research anywhere."
Research programmes linked to the CRC will be based on existing strengths in three major themes, neuropsychiatric disease; cancer and infection; and immunity. These are three areas where the medical schools involved have particular experience in conducting excellent research.
"The central element of this is this is a centre that is in physical continuity with the hospital," he says. "The patients can move in and out of the centre within the hospital campus.
"It will be a functional part of the hospital and it allows us to put clinical science and basic science in the same framework for the improved treatment of patients."
The research networks that form will be supported by a management structure with a central co-ordinating executive to identify and support clinical trials and research at an international level.
Particular emphasis will be put on the nursing framework established in support of the centre, Kelleher explains. RCSI has undertaken to develop additional training for nurses via its links with Beaumont Hospital.
Already, principal investigators (PIs) have been identified to lead research groups associated with the CRC. These PIs include professors and clinicians from St James's, Trinity, Tallaght Hospital, UCD and the Mater and St Vincent's Hospitals, the RCSI and Beaumont Hospital.
The creation of a single dedicated centre for such research will engender synergies that should advance medical research and improve medical practice here. It will also add to Ireland's growing reputation abroad for quality research.