Researchers at UCC may have discovered a cure for retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease of the eyes which results in the premature death of retinal cells and blindness.
A UCC team working under Prof Tom Cotter, head of the biochemistry department, began research on the disease four years ago. It produced a prototype drug under laboratory conditions which was effective in combating the premature death of retinal cells. The next phase was animal testing, and in trials using mice the drug reversed the condition, preventing blindness where it would otherwise have occurred.
Prof Cotter, the current holder of the RDS/Irish Times Boyle Medal, announced the team's findings last night in a public lecture at UCC during Science Week Ireland. He said the breakthrough offered enormous potential and held out the hope of a cure for the disease.
"We demonstrated in a test tube that we could prevent loss of retinal cells and then we went on to demonstrate successfully that the prototype drug was also effective at animal level. The next stage is to make analogues of the drug and then begin clinical trials, hopefully proving that the drug is just as effective when administered to humans," he said.
It would probably take three years for the trials to begin but already, Prof Cotter added, commercial drug manufacturers had shown a keen interest. The work of the research team will be published next year in a number of scientific journals.
He also announced last night that Ms Mary Ann Donovan, a graduate student of the department of biochemistry, won first prize last week at a conference in Switzerland on apoptosis, or programmed cell death.
The story of his research efforts was told last night in Prof Cotter's lecture, "From Gene Jockey to Entrepreneur".
With his 10-strong research team, he had worked in collaboration with Prof Shaun McCann, a bone marrow specialist at St James's Hospital, Dublin, on chronic myelocytic leukaemia, a condition in which cells behave in the direct opposite manner to cells in the retinal disease.
With this form of leukaemia, cells do not obey the natural law of decay and regeneration; rather, they refuse to die. In the mid1990s Prof Cotter identified the gene which refused to shut down, "bcr-abl", which provided a method to allow the cells to be switched off. The pioneering work was granted worldwide patents in 1996 and is destined to be taken up by the commercial sector.
Mr Michael Griffith, chief executive of Fighting Blindness Ireland, approached Prof Cotter and suggested that if the UCC team could switch off the "bad" cells in leukaemia, perhaps they could reverse the technique in the case of retinal cells which died prematurely. Prof Cotter said he had to be persuaded to apply for a research grant, but he did, and the rest is history.
But the title of the lecture? Prof Cotter explained that on a recent flight he sat next to an American man. They got talking about what each did for a living and when he explained his work involved biochemistry and genetic research, his fellow traveller cut straight to the chase. "That's what we call a gene jockey," he said.