It seems like everyone wants a piece of Luke O'Neill's time – even Bill Gates came calling recently for the award-winning scientist, writes CLAIRE O'CONNELL
IT’S HARD NOT to like Prof Luke O’Neill, though there’s plenty to envy. At 45, the Trinity scientist has notched up a remarkable track record in research, contributing from the outset to breakthroughs in understanding inflammation and disease.
Not only that, but he has co-founded a company to develop new generation drugs against a range of debilitating autoimmune conditions like arthritis and Crohn’s disease.
And now it seems everyone wants to give him an award: at home he’s the Science Foundation Ireland “Researcher of the Year” and recipient of the RDS/Irish Times Boyle Medal for Scientific Excellence, and abroad he’s one of only two international immunology “gurus” appointed by the US National Institutes of Health.
Even Bill Gates wants a bit of him – he’s just back from a high-level think tank in Seattle hosted by the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation on the problem of tackling HIV.
With all that laurel fluffing, O’Neill could be forgiven for being full of academic gravitas and sombre self-importance, but he’s not.
Instead he’s laid back and happy to engage whether he has a pipette, a guitar or even a pint in his hand.
There are no pints to be had at Dublin’s Science Gallery when we meet – lunchtime on a workday might be pushing it after all – but over coffee he muses that he very nearly didn’t become a scientist at all.
“At school I was a bit of a generalist, I loved English literature,” recalls O’Neill. But then he veered towards medicine, only to switch his CAO preference to science in Trinity after a sudden change of heart. Even then geology was beckoning, he says, but during the first week of lectures biology finally grabbed him.
Commuting each day from Bray, he admits to not being the most diligent of students. But his final year study in biochemistry, which took samples from patients with Crohn’s disease and analysed levels of particular biochemicals, set off the research spark.
“I think I have always had green fingers doing experiments. I thought, ‘this is real research and I can do something useful’.”
From there O’Neill went to London and Cambridge, carrying out basic research that would underpin the development of new blockbuster anti-inflammatory agents.
But while his scientific career was off to a blistering start, another talent nearly derailed it again. O’Neill was in a band, The Sleeping Arrangements.
“We were like a poor man’s Pogues,” he says. “We had a residency in a pub in Cambridge and one night we did a fantastic gig. At the end of it this guy came up to me and asked if we would be interested in doing a tour of Europe. He was the Fureys’ manager.”
He weighed up ditching the lab for the stage, but opted to stick with science, although he is still known to entertain at parties and conferences.
After Cambridge, O’Neill had a pick of jobs, including an industry position in the US. “A good mate of mine and I were both offered jobs in Seattle,” he says. “He took it and I didn’t. He retired five years ago with something like $30 million.”
But O’Neill had decided to return to Trinity in the 1990s, much to the surprise of his boss in Cambridge. “He told me I was a bloody idiot, there was nothing going on in Ireland, it was a backwater,” he says. “But there was a buzz going then in Ireland, a bit of money was being released so it looked like there could be a chance. I never intended on staying really, but from day one it began going well for me here – I got grants and I was up and running.”
His research made inroads into understanding “toll-like receptors” or “tolls”, newly discovered switches that can turn on inflammation in the body.
One of O’Neill’s big breakthroughs was discovering how the Mal gene is involved in the body’s immune response to infection. People with overactive Mal tend to fare worse in conditions like malaria, TB and pneumococcal pneumonia. Not only did this insight shed light on the immune response in humans, it could provide opportunities for better management and prevention of those diseases.
As well as running a lab of 20 researchers and holding the chair of biochemistry in Trinity, O’Neill has co-founded Opsona Therapeutics, a spin-out to develop drugs that target the immune system and inflammation in chronic disease, including arthritis, heart disease, lupus and Crohn’s disease and even transplant rejection.
“Inflammation has become this really hot area in general, it pervades many diseases. And we could have an embarrassment of riches here, the key goal is to pick one [drug] to do the trials in,” he says.
The company, which he set up with Trinity academics Prof Kingston Mills and Prof Dermot Kelleher and Australian biochemist Dr Mark Heffernan, has already attracted around €30 million in investment and partnered with pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. But O’Neill insists he’s not an entrepreneur.
“For me it’s more a case of being keen to see what you do turned into something useful. I’m not the wheeler-dealer. I don’t have much business acumen. I get up and do the science bit. But I am on the board so I look at the numbers and I am learning something new every day.”
Another ball to juggle is his position as chair of the European Research Council’s immunology panel, which awards research grants to top-level projects across the EU. From that vantage point, how does Ireland stack up?
“It’s only a question of scale at the moment. There are seven or eight PIs in Ireland who could hold their heads up anywhere in the world as immunologists. That’s a good start,” he says. “Then if you look at what we are producing in our publications, we are as good as anywhere, particularly the last two or three years. We can keep doing this at this scale but wouldn’t it be great if we could grow it and make it truly global, have more people and more activity.”
O’Neill has long sung the praises of Science Foundation Ireland, a major funder of basic research in Ireland, and he expresses some relief at the recent budget, which cut science funding by 4.4 per cent, far less than the 14 per cent slash suggested by the McCarthy report.
“It wasn’t too bad, the cuts could have been worse,” he says. “The only worry is that newer programmes might have to be delayed and that could affect younger scientists. But the hope is that we are going to come out of the downturn and they are keeping the boat steady, then when the recovery begins to kick in properly we will see reinvestment again.”
Meanwhile O’Neill is keeping an even keel between heading the lab, contributing to the business, attending conferences, refereeing journal papers and being a family man – he and wife Dr Margaret Worrall (who O’Neill says is a far better scientist than he is) have two sons.
It’s a tight schedule, but he is driven by curiosity and an energy that’s nothing short of infectious.
“This isn’t a job for me because I love it so much,” he says. “In my job there’s only about 20 per cent that I hate, which is pretty good. The rest I love. I’m always scanning the journals. I’m talking to people at conferences. I’m reading, writing. I love it. I think I was really lucky to fall into this. How many people are lucky enough to do what they love?”
