Inaugural Biomedical Sciences Institute Postdoctoral Research Day Highlights Leading Research

Oct 01, 2012

The Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute (TBSI) Postdoctoral Society’s first annual research day showcased postdoc research from across the five schools co-located at the Institute enabling staff and students to witness the breadth of research underway and identify pathways and opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration.

The TBSI on Pearse Street, which integrates preclinical biomedical research across the Schools of Biochemistry & Immunology, Chemistry, Pharmacy, Medicine and Bioengineering, aims to provide an environment where innovative and interdisciplinary approaches lead to discoveries of biomedical importance within areas such as infectious diseases, inflammation, metabolic diseases and cancer.

Professor Luke O’Neill, academic director of the Institute, opened the event remarking that: “Postdocs will be the key drivers of all fundamental discoveries that will be made at the Institute”.  The selected oral presentations featured research spanning a new oncology target and biomarker, a newly identified danger signal from immune cells, predictor genes for HepC/HIV co-infected patients, a new medical device to treat mitral valve heart disease, and luminescent complexes as novel biosensors and probes. 

Winners of the three best posters were Gráinne Cunniffe, Trinity Centre for Bioengineering, ‘Porous decellularised hypertrophic tissue engineered cartilage as a scaffold for bone tissue regeneration’; Oxana Kotova, School of Chemistry, ‘Europium-directed self-assembly formation of a novel luminescent supramolecular gel from a tripodal terpyridine-based ligand’; and Emily Hams, School of Medicine, ‘IL-25 and innate lymphoid cells induce pulmonary fibrosis’.

Dr Annie Curtis, School of Biochemistry and Immunology was presented the Roche Gold Medal for the best talk for her research on how our body clock controls our inflammatory response. The award was provided by one of the event’s sponsors, Roche Diagnostics.  The judges were Professor Paul Hertzog who was visiting from the TBSI sister institute, the Monash Institute for Medical Research, Australia, and Professor Fergal O’Brien from RCSI.  Professor O’Brien leads one the largest regenerative medicine research groups in Ireland and he closed the event with a thought provoking keynote address entitled ‘Pathways to professorship: a week in the life of a research-active academic’.