University College Dublin
University College Dublin UCD) is one of Europe's leading research-intensive universities, where a comprehensive suite of strong disciplines forms the foundation of high-quality interdisciplinary research, scholarship and innovation. UCD is the national leader in research funding, attracting quality investment that has helped the university to establish a reputation as a world-class destination for leading researchers. UCD is ranked within the top 1% of higher education institutions worldwide. UCD researchers have secured significant external research grants with last year’s total (2020/2021) of €132 million. The highest value of funding comes from national agencies such as Science Foundation Ireland, and from the European Commission. These include UCD’s participation in several Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) projects including 3TR and Mobilise-D and in 2020 the coordination of an IMI project SOPHIA and more recently the IMI HIPPOCRATES project. The UCD School of Medicine has an extensive research portfolio focused on diseases of national significant and global importance studied using cellular and molecular biology, bioinformatics and proteomics, through whole organism disease models to patient–based clinical and population studies. This multidisciplinary strength provides a stimulating environment in which scientists and clinicians can interact to support translational clinical research. The School is a principal stakeholder in Ireland’s premier biomedical research institute, the UCD Conway Institute for Biomolecular and Biomedical Research which is focused on developing a better understanding of the causes of disease, simpler and more reliable diagnostic tests, and more effective treatments. The Conway is focused on supporting translational research and includes several core facilities including a proteomics core.
Role within HIPPOCRATES
UCD is the lead institution within the HIPPOCRATES consortium. UCD has a highly developed support structure to support the HIPPOCRATES project, including finance, management and innovation. UCDs role as coordinator includes ensuring overall management of scientific results, monitoring of work programme against deliverable and milestones and overall implementation of the project. The UCD academic team, led by Prof Oliver FitzGerald and Prof Steve Pennington, will be involved in each of the HIPPOCRATES Workpackages (WP) and in the Executive Team. In particular, they will be leading WP2 which is focused on the identification of risk factors for progression to Psoriatic Arthritis (PsA) in patients with Psoriasis. The mass spectrometry-based proteomic analysis for the consortium will take place in UCD and in the UCD spin-out company, ATTUROS.
