Food for thought in APC funding

THE announcement last week of a €50m Government and industry research investment for the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre of food and medicine underlines its growing status as a national centre for food and medicine research excellence.

The investment supports key growth areas in the Action Plan for Jobs 2013 as well as targeting research into major social challenges, including food and health. The funding, which directly supports 109 top research jobs, includes an investment of €14m from 12 key industry partners in the food and health spheres.

The APC spans across University College Cork, Teagasc and the Cork Institute of Technology where teams of researchers will be employed at the centre over the next six years. It is expected that this talent pool will enable Ireland to leverage significant additional investments from EU funding streams and additional industry partners in the years ahead. The Exchequer funding is through the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centres programme, supporting world-class research into how bacteria in the human gut impacts on population health, leading to the development of future foods and medicines.

The agriculture sector is one of Ireland’s largest and most successful industries, with food for health products expected to have a global value of €135bn in 2013. The commercial significance of the APC’s research is highlighted by the participation of 12 companies from the national and international food, pharmaceutical, diagnostic and veterinary sectors, including Kerry Group, Wyeth Nutrition, Alimentary Health, Second Genome, Trino Therapeutics, Sigmoid Pharma. The SFI Research Centres Programme is the largest State and industry co-funded research investment of its kind in Ireland.

“Ten years ago we predicted that the microbes within the gut would be a source of new antibiotics, a source of biomarkers for risk of certain diseases, a regulator of immunity and even an influence on the brain and behaviour,” said Professor Fergus Shanahan, director of the APC. “We also predicted that this field would become one of the most relevant to human biology and to society. All of this has proven to be correct. ”

The APC has already established itself as one of the premier probiotics research facilities in the world, and the new funding will ensure its continued advances in probiotics and pharmabiotics.

“As marvellous as the discovery of the human genetic code has been, the genetic messages contained within our microbes promise even greater advances for human health, veterinary medicine and for both the food and pharmaceutical industries in Ireland,” he said. “The APC is particularly well suited to explore and exploit the mysteries of the human microbiome and can make this science deliver for our society and for our economy.”

The APC was founded in 2003 and initially funded by Science Foundation Ireland and industry partners. The APC has created a trans-disciplinary environment with clinicians and clinician-scientists from diverse backgrounds focused upon the mysteries of the gastrointestinal bacterial community. The scale and scope of the work has become one of the fastest moving areas of biology, of relevance to all branches of medicine and veterinary science, with direct applications to society’s economic welfare.

“The gut microbiota has become one of the hottest areas in medicine,” Prof Shanahan explains. “We predicted this over a decade ago and have built our research platforms accordingly. Host-microbe interactions in the gut remain the focus of research within the APC but the scope of this research is not limited to the gut.”

The APC research focus includes food science, microbiology, infectious diseases, gastroenterology and biochemistry. The independent international ratings agency, Thomson Reuters Science Watch Global Analysis, has ranked UCC at number 2 in the world for probiotics research, due primarily to publications from researchers in the APC. The APC also spun-out a company called Alimentary Health which produced a probiotic health product, Align, which has had major sales in North America.

Maintaining a constant ethos of collegiate communication has been a hallmark of the continuing success of the APC. “The centre is much more than just a gathering of individual researchers, it is an environment of collaboration based on continual communication and cohesion. Our ambitions for the APC are fundamentally unchanged since we began a decade ago, to become a national resource with international impact.”

As well as being director of the APC, Prof Shanahan is also a principal investigator in the host response core, with particular research interests in mucosal immunology, inflammatory bowel disease and most things that influence the human experience.

The APC also works closely with Enterprise Ireland, through awards such as innovation partnerships, which facilitates collaborative research with indigenous companies. It has also received a number of awards to help the commercial development of APC research, such as patent funds and proof of concept awards. EI has recently funded a commercialisation development manager for the APC to market the commercial portfolio of the APC and facilitate the development of a spin-out company.

A recent international symposium entitled ‘The Experience of Illness: Learning from the Arts’ was hosted by the APC to explore the interface between medicine and the arts. Great achievements in modern medicine may have enhanced our knowledge and treatment of many diseases, but understanding what it feels like to be sick requires more than technological advances and medical science.

“Whereas disease is black and white, illness — the experience of disease — is coloured, nuanced by a multitude of variables including personal, social, historic and cultural factors,” said Prof Shanahan of the interaction of medicine and culture. “While science can teach us much about disease, only the arts and humanities can offer us an understanding of what it feels like to be ill.”