A Waterford-based Irish pharmaceutical company and a husband and wife team who are pioneering an innovative speech and language therapy have been nominated for a prestigious entrepreneur award.
EirGen Pharma, based in Waterford city, has won the business category and Release Communication Intervention, the social entrepreneur category in the David Manley Emerging Entrepreneur Awards which will be presented tomorrow.
Both are in line for the overall award which brings with it €80,000 worth of mentoring and consultancy from a selection of Irish companies and €10,000 in cash.
Release Communication Intervention co-founder Tara Cunningham said they were delighted to have already won the social entrepreneur award which they hoped would help them bring their Release programme to another level.
A former fundraiser with Down Syndrome Ireland, she and her husband Mark founded the Release programme two years ago after encountering many desperate parents who were trying to get speech therapy for their children.
To date, Release has counselled 400 children and provided 4,000 hours of speech therapy since it started as a pilot project in 2005. Fourteen children who were non-verbal can now communicate and about 30 children who were in special needs schools are now going to mainstream schools.
"The training is focused on the care giver. It could be a parent, a grandparent, a teacher or a care assistant. We feel that the more people who know how to interact with the child to bring on their communication, the better the child's communication will get," she said.
"It's always group therapy. Our method teaches children life skills while they are having fun. The parents are also taught a particular skill by the speech therapists. Our system gives children over 160 hours of speech therapy every year as opposed to the conventional system which is just nine hours a year," she said.
EirGen Pharma was formed by Tom Brennan and Patsy Carney, two former employees of Waterford-based pharmaceutical multinational Ibax, in 2006.
It already employs 11 people in Waterford city developing generic copies of high-potency cancer and transplant drugs. The company was part of a trade delegation led by Minister Micheál Martin to the United States where it managed to secure development deals with two major pharmaceutical manufacturers.
The company has already successfully completed clinical trials on an early stage breast cancer product and hopes to bring its first drug to market in 2009.
The David Manley Emerging Entrepreneur Award is named after the former businessman and president of Dublin Chamber of Commerce David Manley who died in 2002. The awards are now in their third year.
