Getting just rewards

SCIENCE FOUNDATION IRELAND:OVER THE PAST seven years Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) has awarded funding of more than €20 million to 19 pioneering young researchers through its prestigious President of Ireland Young Researcher Awards (PIYRA) programme. The PIYRA is one of SFI's most prestigious accolades, acknowledging young engineers and scientists who have displayed extraordinary ability and leadership in their particular field.

It is a rigorous competition designed around a single goal – to identify researchers who, at an early stage in their careers, have shown exceptional promise of becoming international research leaders, recognised for excellence in their fields.

“The award was established to position Ireland as a prime location from where young scientific and engineering researchers with exceptional ability could work,” says SFI director general John Travers. “SFI’s involvement in this programme continues to ensure the recruitment of young influential researchers to research bodies across the country, and serves to highlight the extraordinary scientific work that the younger generation of researchers are immersed in.”

Although the number of award holders remains small, almost without exception they have performed at a very high level both by national and international standards. The main objectives of the programme are to identify the most promising of a new generation of top-tier cutting edge researchers in fields that are critical to Ireland’s economic and social prosperity and to offer the funding opportunities that will help Irish research bodies attract those researchers to Ireland.

Other objectives are to stimulate broader investment in first-rate individual researchers and, through them, to attract and develop superb students and to fund a period of intensive research to enhance the candidates’ research programmes and projects and further encourage and promote Ireland’s participation in the international research community.

The latest recipients of these coveted awards, Dr Neil Ferguson of UCD and Dr Natasa Mitic of NUI Maynooth, were formally presented with them at a special reception hosted by the President, Mary McAleese, in Áras an Uachtaráin last month.

“These awards are testament to their dedication to investigating infections which cause countless fatalities across the globe each year,” said the President at the ceremony. “The work being carried out by Dr Ferguson and Dr Mitic are just two examples of the groundbreaking research that is being conducted in science facilities across the country. Exceptional talent and pioneering results, such as that of Dr Ferguson and Dr Mitic, continue to position Ireland as a global leader in innovative science research.”

Dr Ferguson is being recognised for his research into human hepatitis B virus (HBV) biology. Using genetic engineering with new biophysical techniques to dissect HBV into its component molecules, Dr Ferguson’s aim is to obtain new insights into the mechanism of HBV replication, and to design antivirals that will prevent HBV biomolecules from interacting with partner molecules.

“My work on HBV has unquestionably been the most challenging and ambitious research of my scientific career, and receiving this recognition the pinnacle of my career to date – but the quest continues unabated,” says Dr Ferguson. “We are effectively trying to scale a scientific Everest, but the vast scale of human suffering caused by HBV provides a strong incentive to continue.”

And the suffering is truly vast. “There are two types of HBV,” he explains. “The first is the acute infection, which people get and their immune systems take over and fight it and they recover. The second is the chronic form, which is incurable and can result in cirrhosis of the liver and liver cancer. Up to 400 million people worldwide suffer from chronic hepatitis B and about one million die each year as a result of it. It is one of the world’s top 10 fatal illnesses.”

Current therapies have low efficacy, cause side-effects and can lead to viral resistance. Thus, new therapies for HBV are needed urgently. But their development has proved extremely challenging.

Ferguson and his newly established research team at UCD are taking a fresh approach to the problem. Using the latest biophysical techniques they are dissecting HBV into its component molecules in order to reveal, hopefully at unprecedented resolution, their structure, function and molecular interactions.

“When studying hepatitis B they use normal virology techniques,” he points out. “We are using biophysics to go down to an atomic level and look at individual molecules in the virus. We can look at what’s happening in the cell in time periods of millionths of a second over spans of several months.”

The ultimate aim of this research is to see how exactly the mechanisms of the virus’s replication work and use this knowledge to design novel antivirals which will halt these mechanisms. “The key thing really is that if we can work out the rules for this virus, we will be able to apply them to other viruses and develop effective treatments for them as well,” says Ferguson. But that may be some way off yet.

“It is relatively easy to make a drug that will inhibit viral replication, the difficult bit is to make it non-toxic for humans,” he explains. “The first five years of the research will be spent on this and it will take perhaps another five or 10 after this before we have an effective treatment. We are trying to develop a new therapy for just €1 million when the major pharmaceutical companies spend hundreds of millions. We are really trying to punch above our weight here.”

Meanwhile, Dr Mitic, is beginning work in NUI Maynooth on the emerging problem of antibiotic resistance. She is proposing to use structure-based drug design and directed evolution to predict and combat resistance to a particular class of antibiotic widely used in the treatment of many bacterial infections.

The target proteins underlying this resistance are a family of enzymes known as the metallo-beta-lactamases (MBLs). At present there exist no useful inhibitors or drugs to target these enzymes. Mitic’s studies are aimed at revealing regions in the target enzymes associated with antibiotic resistance that are not prone to mutation and thus present suitable targets for the new drugs which will have greater longevity than their forerunners.

“Receiving this award is a great honour for me,” she says. “It will allow for the establishment of a research group at NUI Maynooth where we can build a team with extensive experience and, in turn, foster young minds. Our aim is to use a structure-based drug design and directed evolution to predict and combat resistance to a particular class of antibiotic widely used in the treatment of many bacterial infections.”

Several previous award winners have already gained international recognition for their world-leading research. Dr Aoife McLysaght’s work on genomic research has been covered by media around the globe while Dr Emma Teeling’s work on bat genomics has earned her a place on an international team of scientists that has embarked on one of the most ambitious research projects yet attempted in evolutionary biology. They plan to map the genomes of 10,000 vertebrate animals including fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians and mammals, and in the process create a “genomic zoo”.

Also in the genomics field, the funding provided under the PIYRA programme has assisted Dr Emmeline Hill in the world’s first successful identification of a performance-related gene in thoroughbred horses. This gene was found to predict sprinting ability and stamina potential, which can immediately identify a thoroughbred as a potential sprinter, middle-distance or long-distance horse. Following this breakthrough, she co-founded her own company, Equinome, with Jim Bolger, the well-known Irish horse breeder and trainer, and the Equinome Speed Gene Test was launched commercially in 2010.