Landmark €21 million investment - 17 years celebrating US-Ireland R&D Programme

Congratulations to Professor Catherine Godson and Dr Eoin Brennan - research group awarded €908,860 (incl overhead).

The research group from UCD School of Medicine, UCD Diabetes Complications Research Centre and UCD Conway Institute are collaborating with Professor Peter Maxwell’s group in Queen’s University Belfast and were the recipients of the first US-Ireland award ever made in 2008.

Kidney disease is a common and devastating complication of diabetes and represents a major public health problem worldwide. For this project entitled A functional genomics pipeline for genetic discovery in diabetic kidney disease, Professor Godson and Dr Eoin Brennan UCD School of Medicine, UCD Diabetes Complications Research Centre, UCD Conway Institute will collaborate with Professor Maxwell, Professor Amy Jayne McKnight and Dr Gareth McKay, QUB, Professor Jose Florez and Professor Joel Hirschhorn, Harvard Medical School, and Mass General Hospital, to expand their approach to type 2 diabetes, increasing sample size seven-fold to augment the opportunities for genetic discovery. In addition, by combining and integrating data from several complementary approaches, they hope to identify genes and biological processes that impact the development of diabetic kidney disease and may help guide the development of improved treatments and preventive measures. This work is co-funded by the Health Research Board (HRB) and Health and Social Care (HSC) Research and Development, Northern Ireland.

Well done to the whole group. Read more about the landmark investment.