Irish Research Council Success for School of Biotechnology

The School of Biotechnology is the proud recipient of two of the recently awarded Enterprise-focused research awards under the Irish Research Council’s Enterprise Partnership Scheme.

Recently, the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Simon Harris TD, awarded 50 enterprise-focused research awards to the value of €4.3 million, five of which were from DCU.

The two awardees from the School of Biotechnology; Dr. Neil Conlon and Letizia Palanga, will commence work on their projects investigating mechanisms of cancer in the coming months in the National Institute for Cellular Biotechnology at DCU.

Dr. Neil Conlon, in collaboration with the Cancer Clinical Research Trust, will work on the project ‘Combinatorial-targeted therapy for the treatment of HER2-driven cancer’. ‘HER2 is a specific protein which is found in high levels in several different types of cancer and research has demonstrated it plays an influential role in driving the growth of cancer cells,’ describes Dr. Conlon.

‘My research to date has investigated the role of HER2 is breast cancer, where 1 in 5 patients are diagnosed with HER2+ tumours. While there are drugs which can specifically target these HER2+ cell types, killing them and reducing cancer progression, there are a significant portion of patients who do not respond to these treatments at all, and in many others, the initial response to treatment is not sustained and the tumour recovers and begins to grow again.’

‘Interestingly, while these treatments have had partial success in breast cancer, they have had no impact in other forms of HER2+ cancers.’

‘The overall goal of this project is to test a promising new treatment option for patients with these aggressive, hard-to-treat HER2+ cancers’

‘This award will allow me to try and improve the effect of HER2-targeted treatment, by combining it with a drug currently used to treat leukaemia. Using our laboratory models of HER2-targeted therapy resistance, we have already found that this new treatment can effectively kill breast cancer cells that have become refractory or stopped responding to HER2-targeted drugs. We aim to test this combinatorial treatment in a large number of different HER2+ cancers, including but not limited to; breast, stomach, womb, and ovarian cancers.’   

Letizia Palanga, also in collaboration with the Cancer Clinical Research Trust, will work on the project ‘Microfluidic techniques to develop pre-clinical tumour-derived models for analysis of personalised therapies in uveal melanoma’.

‘Uveal melanoma is the most common type of cancer to occur in the eye and early diagnosis and treatment, like for most diseases, is crucial for patient survival’, describes Dr. Naomi Walsh, lead supervisor on the project, ‘However, in the case uveal melanoma, treatment options are limited in that loss of vision is an unfortunate consequence of the therapies in use today’.

‘This is in part due to our current understanding of uveal melanoma, in which many of the molecular pathways which underpin its development demand further investigation’

‘The breadth of research in this area is at times confounded by the variety of models employed to investigate this disease; each of which has varying degrees of translational value in representing the tumours which develop in a patient with uveal melanoma. Given the limitations in treatments to date, it is becoming increasingly important to use models of the disease which most accurately reflect the nature of said disease in order to effectively develop the optimal therapeutic strategy towards such.’

‘In our project, Letizia will develop pre-clinical tumour-derived organoid models of uveal melanoma from patient samples. 3D patient-derived organoids are better models of uveal melanoma as they retain the molecular and genomic features of the disease. This multi-disciplinary project in collaboration with Dr. Damien King (FPC@DCU), Prof. Susan Kennedy (Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital), and Prof. John Crown, will explore high-throughput microfluidic screening of potential therapeutic targets, and also presents an opportunity to investigate a personalised treatment approach; matching genomic and actionable vulnerabilities in uveal melanoma to targeted therapies.’

The School extends it congratulations to the awardees, their supervisors, and their collaborators, on this success.