Patients to benefit from €20m research centre

FundingIrish patients will benefit from the latest advances in scientific research into diseases thanks to a clinical research centre to be built on the grounds of St James's Hospital in Dublin. A consortium of researchers beat secured €20 million in funding to create the centre, it has been announced.

The funding, which was awarded to Trinity College Dublin (TCD), University College Dublin and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, will strengthen clinical research links between the institutions, and will cover areas such as cancer, neuro-psychiatric conditions and inflammatory and infectious diseases.

The Wellcome Trust and the Health Research Board (HRB) will fund infrastructure over five years.

"It will give us capacity at a level that will put us up there with the major medical centres of the world in terms of what we can do in treating people," said Prof Dermot Kelleher, TCD's professor of clinical medicine, who spearheaded the proposal.

The centre is expected to be up and running by 2009 and will focus on translating scientific discoveries into state-of-the-art therapies for patients, he said.

The funding will also support a network of clinical research across Dublin, which will be co-ordinated through the Dublin Molecular Medicine Centre (DMMC), an existing collaborative research partnership between the three universities.

The network will link the new centre at St James's with an existing clinical research centre at Beaumont Hospital and with emerging facilities at the Mater Misericordiae and St Vincent's University Hospitals.

Funding for the initiative will be drawn from a larger €108 million programme run by the Wellcome Trust in partnership with local funding authorities to improve clinical research infrastructure in the UK and Ireland.

The Wellcome Trust will fund around €10 million for building the new centre in Dublin while the HRB will provide another €10 million for operational costs, according to Dr Ruth Barrington, chief executive of the HRB.

"We were delighted to partner the Wellcome Trust in this internationally very significant initiative they have led to build capacity in clinical research in the UK and Ireland," she said. "We think this is one of the most significant things that has happened in health research in Ireland for a generation."