Rarely a week passes by when an article isn’t published on Amber, the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI)-funded Advanced Materials and Bioengineering Research Centre in Trinity. Since its inception almost three years ago, Amber has enjoyed unprecedented success in securing funding and partnerships and winning awards. While the average student is almost certainly aware that Amber exists, what they do and how they do it is definitely more enigmatic.
Founded on the back of a substantial grant from SFI and monies obtained from industry and the EU, Amber represents a partnership between the Trinity Centre for Bioengineering, the Trinity Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices (CRANN), the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) and University College Cork (UCC). In 2013, SFI put out a call saying they wanted to fund these enormous research centres. Speaking to The University Times about how such a collaboration came about, Prof David Taylor, who lectures in material sciences in Trinity, said that “a lot of people in College look around saying ‘how can we position ourselves to try and go for this?’. A lot of it is just being big enough really, having enough people with some kind of common goal. That’s why the material scientists in CRANN and the bioengineers got together because they said ‘well, look, we’ve got a lot of common interests here’. Quite a few of the material scientists were already working on biomedical problems anyway, so I suppose they could talk up a story that made sense to combine all these people together. And I guess it all started with the funding body.” The researchers are sent conditions that, if they complete, can lead to large funding boosts: “You get an email saying ‘so and so is giving away lots of money but these are the conditions and do you think you could fit them?’”.
UCC and RCSI also came on board as well, as many researchers in Trinity were doing work with them anyway. A number of Prof Taylor’s former PhD students are now professors in RCSI.
Cross-discipline centres like Amber present a unique opportunity to foster overlap between different fields of research. Professor of Chemical Physics, Jonathan Coleman, believes that more can be done to nurture this overlap: “This isn’t a criticism on anyone, but I think we could do more to do more research in that overlapping space. And we are trying to do more. And that’s where the centres are really good because they bring people together. I mean, you’re never going to get that sort of overlap if people don’t talk to each other. But when they’re working together in the same centre of course they talk to each other. So it’s happening, it’s great, there’s good stuff coming out but you know, it needs to go further.”
Since its inception almost three years ago, Amber has enjoyed unprecedented success in securing funding and partnerships and winning awards
Coleman’s own work is centred around graphene: the thinnest, strongest, stretchiest and one of the most electrically conductive materials known to man. All of these superlatives make it unusual. Before graphene, you would find a material that is useful for one thing, and that would be really exciting, but graphene is superlative at “many many things so a lot of people believe that it will be useful for loads and loads of applications”.
“So that’s what I do, and, in fact, there are other people working in Amber working on graphene or other two dimensional materials, and it’s quite actually a large concentration of researchers”, Coleman continues. “So working on 2D materials in Amber, there would be maybe between 50 and 60 people. So that’s quite a big concentration. And we would be recognised throughout the world as world leaders on 2D materials.” He goes on to mention other work done by Amber researchers, including some bioengineering projects run by Prof Fergal O’Brien of RCSI and Prof Daniel Kelly, Director of the Trinity Centre for Bioengineering.
Kelly’s research interests lie in tissue engineering, which is this idea of trying to grow new tissues and organs to replace damaged tissues or diseased tissues in the body. Kelly works with stem cells, biomaterials and bioreactors. These are carefully controlled environments where one can control the type of stimuli the cells experience, which can encourage them to produce different tissue types and produce more functional tissue types. Kelly says he works “very much at the interface of materials, stem cell biology and engineering to grow and engineer these new tissues”.
Amber is the envy of many European and US-based centres that don’t have the same infrastructures in place to formulate and negotiate industry partners in such an effective manner
This is really only a taste of the work that Amber does. There are lots of other lines of research including advanced magnetic materials, inkjet printing templates to allow the growth of, for example, bones to materials for implants and all sorts. It’s a huge operation that produces world-leading work.
A key element of Amber, which makes it a little unusual, not only in the Irish context but also internationally, is that it’s not just about research. It’s about doing industry-focused research such as taking the breakthroughs and partnering with industry to take it further and into the market. This presented somewhat of a challenge initially, as what Amber was attempting to do was pretty much unprecedented. CRANN would have been one of the first research centres to do a lot of industry engagement, not to a large scale, but there existed a foundation on which Amber would build momentously. It was a learning process, according to Professor Coleman: “When you’re an academic researcher, what you want to do is discover things and then write papers and then ideally have those papers published in journals like Nature and stuff. When you’re working with industry, they want different things. So they generally want a patent that protects the intellectual property, that then they can license and then have exclusive rights to that property. And if you write a paper, and publish the paper, then you can’t patent.”
“And what you can’t have is all the research money being spent on centres and none going to individual people with what could be crazy ideas or could be revolutionary ideas. You have to have both”
“So then if you go to a conference and talk about it, it’s in the public domain, you can’t patent it. So there’s a fundamental divide there that you have to learn how to manage. And so, at the start it was quite difficult and it was difficult, first of all because we didn’t have experience doing it”, Coleman continues. This learning curve was not just applicable to Amber: “But secondly, you would find that, in Ireland, some of the companies didn’t know how to engage with academia, just the same as we didn’t know how to engage with them. So at the start, there was a very strong learning curve, in that we had to educate companies, you know, as to what we wanted and they would educate us to what they wanted – patents, we wanted papers. And then you have to find a mode of working that suits everyone.”
The success of industry partnerships is largely attributed to the support staff in Amber who work to secure partners and agreements. Once the framework is in place, it becomes easier. However, operations at this scale require huge numbers of people who are experts in this area, meaning that centres like Amber cost an awful lot to run. Once again, Amber is the envy of many European and US-based centres that don’t have the same infrastructures in place to formulate and negotiate industry partners in such an effective manner.
Amber has developed a global reputation, with industry partners all over the world, including the US, Japan and mainland Europe, turning to Ireland for help in developing solutions to their problems. On Amber’s success in fostering global partnerships Taylor says it may be “kind of an unexpected/unplanned outcome, but one that’s quite important, and that, in itself, is also good because it keeps the companies here. If there’s more added value here, I think they’ll stay”.
While acknowledging that research centres are great for doing a specific job – which is bringing people together with a focus, in this case to work with industry – Coleman cautions that it’s not the only way to do research: “There’s still a huge role for professors applying for grants to do some sort of research project, on their own, that doesn’t require a centre or may have nothing to do with industry but could lead to something interesting in the future. So you have to have both those things.”
“And what you can’t have is all the research money being spent on centres and none going to individual people with what could be crazy ideas or could be revolutionary ideas. You have to have both, and there’s a worry in Ireland that we’re shifting towards a situation where the vast majority of research money will go to centres”, he continues.
The proposal for Amber 2, the second round of SFI funding, is currently being written with the hope to make Amber even bigger and better with more money and more industry partners. As Amber’s seemingly never-ending success continues, the centre was recognised recently at the SFI Science Summit for with an Industry Partnership Award alongside the pharmaceutical company, Merck.
