TCD launches €2m facility

A €2 million screening facility launched in Dublin yesterday will boost disease research here to an unprecedented level and help improve patient diagnosis and treatment, an expert has said.

The new high content analysis facility at St James's Hospital can screen millions of cells per hour for signs of disease and for responses to drugs, and means scientists can now get valuable data in weeks rather than years, according to Dr Yuri Volkov, a senior lecturer at Trinity College Dublin's Institute of Molecular Medicine.

"It will facilitate the understanding of the mechanisms of disease and it will also open new ways for treatment," he told The Irish Times.

The automated analysis system takes images of samples and can record data about cell function, shape and specific reactions to chemicals, such as potential drugs, explained Dr Volkov, speaking before the launch. The approach can be applied to cells grown experimentally in a lab or to cells and tissues taken directly from patients.

"It's like comprehensive patient screening but transferred onto a cellular level. So you get indications of overall cell health but you can see how the individual molecules interact," he said. "You can do the samples one by one but it takes time, so you are lagging behind eventually. Instead, the high content approach is at a previously unimaginable level of accuracy and done rapidly in an independent manner, so it's quick and unbiased."

The approach can also detect low-level changes in cells that may be relevant to what actually happens in our bodies, he added. "The high content approach is a change in the scientific way of thinking. You have to think differently. That's why the value of the information is much bigger and it's much closer to the physiological than we had before," he said.

The high content analysis facility has been developing at St James's for two years and was officially launched there yesterday by Dr Ruth Barrington, chief executive of the Dublin Molecular Medicine Centre.

This is the first such service in an academic setting in Europe, according to Dr Volkov.

"The pharmaceutical industry uses the approach for drug discovery in a high throughput manner, but the cost of the system is generally prohibitive for academics," Dr Volkov said of the facility, which received funding through the Health Research Board, the Trinity Foundation and equipment developers.

Researchers at Trinity are already using the high content approach to look at cancer, inflammation, infectious diseases and the developing field of nano-medicine. The massive volume of data generated also needs a dedicated IT system capable of handling terabytes of information, explained Dr Volkov.

He hoped the facility would spark collaboration with other institutions in the State and quickly open up new avenues for clinically-oriented research here.

"The greatest impact is that we are bringing it closer to the patient," he said.

"Those studies which we thought might take us years, we are now getting there in a matter of months and weeks."