Funding under Cycle 2 of the Government's Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions (PRTLI) in particular supported projects which brought together researchers from different institutions. The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland proposal, which won £7.3 million, also sought to harness fundamental research and actual patient treatments.
The new funding will be used to create a biopharmaceutical sciences network which will integrate basic and clinical research in the area of how drugs work in humans, explained the project's lead proposer, Prof Desmond Fitzgerald, professor of clinical pharmacology at the college.
He said this was the second significant block of PRTLI funding won by the RCSI under the Higher Education Authority-organised programme. Cycle 1 support worth £8.7 million was used to establish the Institute of Biopharmaceutical Sciences at the college.
"The institute was funded under the first HEA cycle and the biopharmaceutical sciences network is an extension of that," said Prof Fitzgerald. The idea was to "integrate basic science and clinical practice" so that advances in medical science could be brought as quickly as possible into patient treatments.
He said the network would further this by bringing together researchers from UCC, Trinity College and Maynooth who would collaborate on research and share advanced facilities available at the RCSI.
The network members will have access to a number of "core biotechnologies", said Prof Fitzgerald, including mass spectroscopy facilities at the college, proteomics and genotyping cores, advanced organic chemical synthesis and a new transgenic facility which will be built on the Trinity campus.
The new venture will also provide a new germ-free facility at UCC for the study of probiotics, bacteria which have therapeutic potential in inflammatory bowel disease, and an extended bioinformatics programme. This will not just be for collaborating institutions but will be more broadly based via the Virtual Institute of Bioinformatics in Eire.
The network would "extend the use of these biotechnologies" and facilitate collaborative ventures, said Prof Fitzgerald. The programme supported a wide variety of research initiatives.
The professor of surgery at UCC, Prof Gerald O'Sullivan, will develop his colon cancer work and studies of "micro metastases", groups of cancer cells which break away from the main tumour site and often resist conventional treatments.
His colleague, professor of medicine Prof Fergus Shanahan, is studying how probiotic bacteria can suppress the growth of harmful bacteria in the gut. The new transgenic facility at Trinity will be central to research carried out there by Prof Peter Humphries, who has developed mouse models for progressive retinal diseases which cause blindness.
Professor of medicine at the RCSI, Prof Gerald McElvaney, will head the "vector core" which involves research into how viruses might be used to deliver gene therapy treatments to patients with inherited disorders.