Prof Cotter is professor of biochemistry and head of the Biochemistry Department at University College Cork. His particular area of expertise is the natural and necessary process of programmed cell death, known as apoptosis.
Apoptosis must occur if we are to remain healthy and grow. Old cells make way for new, and cells no longer required automatically dispose of themselves. A good example of the latter occurs during foetal development in the womb when the web-like tissues between the child's developing fingers gradually disappear via apoptosis.
Too much or too little of this vital process can lead to illness. Unnecessary and inappropriate cell death occurs in disorders such as multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer's disease where important tissues die off and are not replaced quickly enough.
Too much cell growth occurs when cancers develop and tumour cells begin to grow out of control. In this case apoptosis is blocked and cells lose their ability to die.
Prof Cotter and his research team are studying apoptosis in detail, trying to understand what takes place within the cell to prompt natural cell death. It is controlled by specific genes which switch on and off in an orderly fashion to destroy the cell. He is trying to discover which genes play a role in this process.
Closely allied to this work is his study of how stress can affect cells. When cells come under pressure after exposure to poisons, severe temperatures or changes in acidity, certain genes begin to express stress proteins, substances that protect the cell and help it survive the stress. When the stress is removed, the proteins disappear, unless the stress has been too great, in which case it goes into programmed cell death.
There is an interplay between genes inside the cell which protect against stress or initiate apoptosis, and Prof Cotter is seeking to understand this. There are important clinical implications to such research.
He reported in a recent peer-reviewed paper how multiple exposure to stresses could initiate apoptosis in cell cultures in the laboratory. This could be important in the treatment of cancer patients using chemotherapy. These drugs are actually poisons which can affect all cells but have a greater impact on rapidly growing cancer cells.
Some cancers become resistant to chemotherapy because their stress proteins protect them. He found that a second stress helped to overcome this resistance.
Another project involved studying why patients just out of surgery often have excessive numbers of a certain type of white blood cell, which in turn causes inflammation that slows recovery.
Prof Cotter and colleagues discovered that one of the anaesthesia gases actually reduced apoptosis in these cells.
Prof Cotter did his undergraduate degree in biochemistry at UCC and his PhD at Oxford University. He did postdoctoral research at the University of Colorado before returning to Ireland where he joined the staff at NUI, Maynooth. He has been based at UCC since 1995.
He is married to Kate and has two children, Sean (13) and Laoise (10).