Paul Glynn | Contributing Writer
Trinity College School of Medicine has partnered with the National Children’s Research Centre (NCRC) at Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital in Crumlin to provide €1.7 million in funding to create three new Assistant Professorship positions as part of a new research programme focused on paediatric immunology.
The newly-appointed Assistant Professors are Drs Patrick Walsh, Roger Preston and Sarah Doyle, all Assistant Professors in Clinical Medicine at the School of Medicine in TCD. They will be working on-site at the NCRC in the hospital to ensure close collaboration with the centre’s paediatric scientists.
The move comes as the two centres establish the Paediatric Research in Translational Immunology (PRiTI) Programme. The programme is dedicated to the study of immunologic mechanisms of disease in children, and will contribute to the development of more targeted forms of treatment for common children’s inflammatory diseases such as asthma, eczema and infant sepsis.
Professor Paul Browne, Interim Head of the TCD School of Medicine, said that the introduction of the Assistant Professorships “will ensure our immunologists are in proximity to children with inflammatory conditions. These translational research environs will make real discoveries that will improve the health of children.” He also commented that the programme’s “ethos of bench-bedside paediatric research will be relevant to the new National Children’s Hospital at St James’s Hospital.”
Professor Carlos Blanco, director of the NCRC, stated: “The National Children’s Research Centre and the Children’s Medical Research Foundation are committed to funding and facilitating the development of paediatric research in Ireland.” He also spoke of the centre’s aspirations to become a “nationally and internationally recognised centre for the quality of its research, its contribution to advances in paediatric medicine and a driver of the research agenda in paediatrics.”
The programme is led by two TCD School of Medicine professors: the Director of the programme is Professor Padraic Fallon, Stokes Professor of Translational Immunology, with Professor Alan Irvine, Professor of Dermatology, as co-Director.
