Irish biopharma company Opsona Therapeutics last week announced a new round of investment, to the tune of €33 million. Their goal? To dampen the body’s early immune response to kidney transplant and so improve the odds that the transplanted organ will bed…
Novus Medica
Medical news service from Penhire
Blog Archives
Irish mathematician cracks immunity code
AN Irish mathematician has helped crack complex codes about our immune system which may lead to better treatments for Crohn’s, coeliac disease, diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis. Dr Ken Duffy, of NUI Maynooth’s Hamilton Institute, made the breakthrough on a team…
Vaccine can kill cancer cells
RESEARCHERS AT Trinity College Dublin have developed a promising vaccine that can kill cancer cells. The method has been patented, and the researchers hope to test it in humans in two to three years. “The idea of cancer vaccines is…
Clostridium difficile profile
Understanding how our bodies respond to problematic bacteria is one way of figuring out how to handle them. Dr Christine Loscher, a senior lecturer in immunology at Dublin City University (DCU), has been working out how the bacterium Clostridium difficile…
Research that explores link between ailments
AUTOIMMUNE DISEASES such as rheumatoid arthritis and the Spondylarthropathies (SpA), which include debilitating conditions such as ankylosing spondylitis (AS), psoriatic arthritis and Crohn’s disease, are among the most common and difficult to treat chronic illnesses in medicine. The nexus between…
Opsona gets €5.9m in European funding
THE EUROPEAN Commission has given Irish biotech group Opsona Therapeutics €5.9 million funding under the seventh framework programme to drive clinical development of the company’s prospective therapy to block organ rejection in kidney transplant patients. The company, which was spun…
Irish biotech firm may hold key to medical conundrum
Australian pharmacologist Mark Heffernan was on the lookout for a business opportunity in Irish biotech; a team of Trinity immunologists was wondering whether to take the plunge in commercialising interesting research. That “cold call” led to the creation, in 2004,…
TCD research on microRNAs
MicroRNAs are a recent discovery and research into them has exploded in the last few years, explains Luke O’Neill, professor of biochemistry at Trinity, who is looking at their roles in the immune system and disease. “We have found that microRNA…
Decline in uptake of some childhood vaccinations
[From Irish Times >>>] Dr Suzanne Cotter, public health specialist with the Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC), said the latest available immunisation uptake data for Ireland – which runs to June 2010 – indicated a number of children were not…
A springboard to faster bug detection
IN THE FUTURE, testing children for immunity to malaria could be a much faster and less traumatic process than at present. Miniature technology developed at Trinity College Dublin can reduce the amount of blood needed to just a pinprick. When…
