Prof John Fitzpatrick, ICS
By Gary Culliton.
There has been an increase in ‘Movember’ Irish Cancer Society (ICS) funding from €1.8 million in 2012 to €2.2 million in 2013, the Head of Research in the Irish Cancer Society, Prof John Fitzpatrick, has said.
The ICS, in collaboration with the Movember Foundation, is backing new prostate cancer research to the tune of €350,000 provided annually for five years to fund Irish Prostate Cancer Outcomes Research (IPCOR), explained Prof Fitzpatrick. “This is an exciting opportunity for the prostate cancer research community in Ireland to come together and collaborate to understand the challenges of prostate cancer and to take a fresh, innovative approach to transforming our knowledge of this disease and, through IPCOR, to publicly report on outcomes of treatment and care in this country. A €750,000 grant will also now be provided over two years to three Prostate Cancer Transformative Programme interlinked projects.”
This €750,000 grant over two years has been awarded to the Irish Programme for Stratified Prostate Cancer Therapy (iPROSPECT), led by Consultant Medical Oncologist Dr Ray McDermott. The iPROSPECT programme consists of connected and supported projects, all of which are integrated to bring about a transformation from current practice to a more individual and personalised treatment of patients with metastatic prostate cancer in order to improve patient outcomes.
In Ireland, the number of prostate cancers diagnosed has increased from 1,162 in 1995 to 3,122 in 2010, while the number of deaths is just over 500 per annum.
The Irish Cancer Society this week also awarded €350,000 in funding to Molecular Medicine Ireland, led by Consultant Urologist Dr David Galvin, Chairperson and Clinical Lead, Prostate Cancer Committee, National Cancer Control Programme (NCCP), to establish the IPCOR in Ireland that will monitor, benchmark and publicly report annually on outcomes of prostate cancer treatment and care.
Funding for a further four years will be made available, subject to satisfactory reporting, to bring the total IPCOR fund amount to €1.75 million over five years.
The Prostate Cancer Transformative Programme Grant includes the project ‘Prostate Cancer — Bone Marrow Mesenchymal Stem Cells Paraendocrine in the Metastatic Tumour Microenvironment: Impact on Tumour Response to Metastatic Targeted Therapies’. The project lead is Dr Sharon Anneve Glynn, NUI Galway, with co-investigators Prof Stephen Finn, St James’s Hospital and Trinity College Dublin, Prof John O’Leary, St James’s and TCD, and Prof Frank Sullivan, NUI Galway and Galway University Hospital.
Prof Finn is also the project lead for the second project, ‘Discovery and Clinical Implementation of Novel Predicitive Biomakers for Enzalutamide therapy’, which has co-investigators Dr McDermott, Prof O’Leary and Dr Cathal O’Brien, TCD and St James’s.
Project three, meanwhile, will cover the ‘Evolution of the CRPC Epigenome and its Clinical Application for delivering Precision Medicine’. The lead on this project is Dr Antoinette Perry, TCD, with co-investigators Prof Finn, Dr Steven Gray, St James’s and TCD, and Dr Simon Wong, Irish Centre for High End Computing.
The ICS has contributed more than €30 million to cancer research since 1963.
gary.culliton@imt.ie
