A total of €6 million is to be invested over three years into the research of both common and rare diseases including brain tumours, retinitis pigmentosa (a form of blindness), muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis.
Thirty-three charity-led research projects will be funded under the new joint scheme co-ordinated by the Medical Research Charities Group (MRCG) and the Health Research Board (HRB).
MRCG chairman Mr John McCormack said MRCG members are typically small charities with limited budgets for funding research.
"This initiative where the Government match the MRCG members' annual investment of €1 million means that we can support a substantial increase in the number of research projects," he said.
Speaking at the official announcement of the grant recipients, Health Minister Mary Harney said this new funding initiative brought together the commitment and priorities of the charities to support patient-focused medical research and the expertise of the HRB to ensure that the research was funded on the basis of excellence, peer review and relevance.
The funding will help to advance the work of a group of scientific research geneticists from Trinity College Dublin who were the first to discover the defects in the genes that cause retinitis pigmentosa.
Retinitis pigmentosa (RP) is one cause of blindness and the name given to a group of hereditary eye disorders.
The researchers hope to develop a safe and effective system for introducing corrective genetic material to the appropriate cells of the eye to restore sight. It is hoped that their research will provide a basis for new treatments of other serious diseases such as cancer, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's or other diseases where genetic malfunction plays an apparent role.
Another project to benefit from the joint MRCB/HRB funding is Dr Verena Murphy's work at Dublin City University in the area of drugs for brain tumours - a type of cancer resistant to most drugs and radiotherapy.
Dr Murphy is looking at a new series of drugs called tyrosine kinase inhibitors to treat brain tumours. In her pre-clinical work, she hopes to assess the effectiveness of these drugs and if possible, to individualise treatment based on the molecular profile of each particular patient's tumour.
Funding is also being invested in a new research project already underway to collect clinical and genetic information from more than 400 cystic fibrosis (CF)patients in Dublin and Belfast. Then, working in collaboration with researchers from the University of Washington, Seattle, the research group will carry out large scale genetic association studies in more than 700 CF patients to identify novel genes that actually influence lung function.
The aim is to identify why some patients get more severe CF lung disease than others and it is hoped that the results may also lead to new targets for future therapies.
