Researchers at the Trinity Translational Medicine Institute (TTMI) are part of a successful consortium to secure €6.8M government funding as part of a 3-year, €10.5M programme to develop next generation cell therapies for cancer.
The HEALED consortium is one of 29 projects that the government has funded under the Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund (DTIF) which is managed and funded through the Department of Enterprise and Innovation (DBEI) in Ireland.
The research team at TTMI at St James’s Hospital have partnered with RemedyBio, aCGT Vector DAC and the SFI Centre for Research Training (CRT) in Genomics Data Science at NUIG to create the HEALED Consortium.
The consortium brings together deep capabilities in mass-scale functional biology, GMP clinical deployment, clinical and tumour microenvironment expertise in cancer, and molecular data analytics to create a world first in near-patient, personalised, functional cancer therapeutics.
The goal of the HEALED consortium is to enable a new kind of revolutionary immunotherapy to cure cancers that are currently incurable.
Commenting on the award, Professor Aideen Long, Director of the Trinity Translational Medicine Institute said:
"The DTIF programme represents an exemplary translational medicine approach. It engages academia, clinicians and industry in a partnership to revolutionise cancer treatment to deliver next generation immunotherapies targeting solid tumours. This synergistic focus on world-class innovation will inevitably unlock significant exploitable outcomes in cellular therapeutics to deliver our programme and more, but ultimately, will contribute to better patient outcomes."
The HEALED consortium is one of 29 projects which secured funding under the third round of the Government’s Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund (DTIF). The selected projects will receive a total of €95m over the next three years. So far, €235m has been allocated out of the total fund of €500m: (https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/75daf-government-announce-95m-for-ground-breaking-projects-under-disruptive-technologies-fund/).
This article was first published on May 5 by Trinity College Dublin.
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