From left: Prof Sarah Jane Delany, Minister James Lawless, TD, Celine Fitzgerald and Prof Vincent Kelly. Image: © Jason Clarke Photography
The Trinity-led hub will focus on research in therapeutics, while the TU Dublin-led hub will look at ICT and AI commercialisation.
Ireland is getting two new hubs designed to bring research to commercialisation outcomes.
Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science James Lawless, TD, has today (12 February) announced funding of €63.8m for the two ‘Accelerating Research to Commercialisation’ (ARC) hubs. One hub will focus on therapeutics, while the other will explore ICT research.
The programme will be administered by Research Ireland and is co-funded by the Irish Government and the European Union under the European Regional Development Fund.
ARC hubs will have a budget that will support researchers who have identified opportunities where their work can be accelerated towards commercial impact.
This budget may also support follow-on funding for successful projects, as well as new projects during the lifetime of the hub if they are high-quality projects with commercial potential.
Research Ireland’s interim CEO, Celine Fitzgerald, said the ARC Hub programme is “a gamechanger” for driving regional development through the commercialisation of research.
“The two ARC hubs unveiled today – therapeutics and ICT respectively – will create regional entrepreneurial ecosystems in two critically important sectors for the Irish economy,” she said.
“Accelerating the overall journey to impact will be achieved by enabling researchers with novel ideas to become future entrepreneurs, with the hubs providing an integrated approach to research funding, entrepreneurial training and access to networks and supports.”
The €31.6m ARC Hub for Therapeutics will be headquartered at Trinity College Dublin and will have University College Dublin (UCD) and RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences (RCSI) as consortium partners.
The therapeutics hub at Trinity will be led by Prof Vincent Kelly, who said the consortium is looking forward to using “highly promising therapeutics research” to deliver new products, processes and services to market.
“There is a tremendous talent pool among researchers in Ireland working within therapeutics-related fields and we hope the new hub will help more and more of them to deliver myriad innovations that will leave an indelible impact across the globe,” he said.
This research could help to provide treatments for diseases such as cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease using advanced treatments options such as vaccines, cellular therapies and gene-therapies as well as traditional small molecule drug approaches.
Meanwhile, the ARC Hub for ICT will be housed at TU Dublin and led by Prof Sarah Jane Delany. This hub will focus on bringing ICT and AI research to commercialisation, with the aim of driving digital transformation across healthcare, education, infrastructure, sustainability and data management.
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