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UCD clinician scientist wins ESOF 2010 award

UCD Conway postdoctoral research fellow, Dr Donal Brennan has become the first Irish recipient of the European Young Researcher Award. He presented his research and received his award at the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF) in Turin, Italy on Saturday, July 3rd 2010.

The European Young Researcher award recognises outstanding scientists in the early stages of their career who have already demonstrated excellence at national and European levels. Although granted annually, the award ceremony is held biennially at the ESOF event when the two most recent recipients present their work.    

Dr Donal Brennan, a specialist registrar in obstetrics & gynaecology at the Coombe Womens and Infants University Hospital, has been using the latest in high-throughput protein screening technology to identify and validate new biomarkers of breast and ovarian cancer as well as trying to improve how assay data is interpreted in clinical laboratories.

Brennan (pictured right) exemplifies a new generation of scientists who recognise the importance of the translational aspect of their research. He believes that there is a pressing need for improved and innovative strategies to expedite the translation of cancer biomarkers from the discovery phase into the clinical setting in order to inform therapeutic decisions.

In the post-genomic era, with the advances in the technology capable of screening and profiling large numbers of expressed proteins and the open access to vast libraries of human protein expression data for comparison purposes, the rate of biomarker discovery has accelerated. However, progress in the development of clinically implemented assays to detect these biomarkers has not kept pace.

There are a number of drawbacks to the immunohistochemistry (IHC) assay traditionally used in clinical laboratories to identify protein biomarkers of cancer in patient tissue. Critically, it is a semi-quantitative approach to determining protein expression levels in tissue where a pathologist manually scores the amount of protein expressed in a given piece of tissue mounted on a slide under the microscope. Poor reproducibility of results is a factor even for the most experienced practitioners.

With his principal investigator, Professor William Gallagher and collaborators in Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States, Donal Brennan has used image analysis in conjunction with the IHC assay to provide pathologists with an automated, analytical approach to interpret and quantify data. This has far greater potential for increased accuracy of analysis and interpretation of the results.
 
Commenting on the award, Dr Donal Brennan said, “This award recognises the success of collaborative work with European colleagues and the huge potential that now exists as a result of efforts to combine antibody based proteomics with the application of image analysis and advanced statistical modelling to IHC assay data. Indeed, it may even offer a viable route to the ultimate goal of personalising therapeutic regimens in cancer care”.

Professor Gallagher said “Dr Brennan made a massive impact on our laboratory, providing a key bridge between the discovery of cancer progression-associated biomarkers and the clinical interface. His knowledge of the clinical domain, combined with excellent scientific expertise, has allowed us to make great strides in the field of molecular diagnostics. Indeed, this work has now paved the way for a commercially viable product, thanks to the efforts of Dr. Brennan and another key researcher in my group, Dr. Elton Rexhepaj.”

The primary funders of the research Dr Brennan performed in Professor Gallagher’s laboratory were the Health Research Board of Ireland, Enterprise Ireland and the European Commission.

Dr Brennan has more than 20 peer reviewed research articles in leading scientific journals and is named on 7 patents. He has received many awards to date including the 2010 St Luke’s Young Investigator Award, the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland Registrar’s Prize (2009) and the O’Connell Medal for Oncology Research (2006). A medical and PhD graduate of University College Dublin, Donal Brennan is a member of the Royal College of Physicians in Ireland.

The next Euroscience Open Forum will be held in Dublin in 2012.

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