National Initiatives

Precision Oncology Ireland (POI) is a consortium of 5 Irish Universities, 6 Irish Charities, and 7 industry partners aiming to develop new diagnostics and therapeutics for personalised cancer treatment. This is the ­first time that researchers, charities and industry have combined forces to tackle this challenge. Coordinated by Systems Biology Ireland, the POI consortium will include 53 researchers and staff based across five Irish Universities (UCD, TCD, NUIG, UCC and RCSI). The consortium is part-funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) under their Strategic Partnership Programme. The combined SFI, charity, and industrial funding commitment to POI totals €11.9 million over five years.

The programme’s shared vision is to combine cutting-edge genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and imaging technologies, integrated through computational analysis and modelling. This information will be used to generate molecular profiles that allow us to better understand cancer pathogenesis, progression, and response to therapies. Bringing together experimental and computational advances, combined through data integration, is a key competitive advantage of the POI consortium. The results will be better diagnostics, personalised cancer therapies, and acceleration of cancer drug discovery and development.

For more information, see the project webpage at (opens in a new window)http://www.precisiononcology.ie.