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UCD Conway Festival medal awarded for cell signalling research

Dr Marc Birtwistle has been awarded the 2010 UCD Conway Festival of Research & Innovation gold medal, sponsored by Roche, for his research to decipher the mechanism cells use to turn on and off biological decisions. A postdoctoral researcher in Systems Biology Ireland, Dr Birtwistle was shortlisted from over 85 Conway scientists to present this original research at the 10th annual UCD Conway Festival of Research & Innovation on Thursday, September 16th in University College Dublin. 

Marc Birtwistle described his work to understand how breast cancer cells listen to two different signals using a systems biology approach. One signal causes these cells to grow, whereas the other causes these cells to differentiate. These signals activate or inactive subsequent signalling potential, which when perturbed or faulty have been implicated in the progression of numerous types of cancer.

Winner of the 2010 UCD Conway Festival medal, Dr Marc Birtwistle (right) pictured with Roche representative, Simon Thorpe. 

The cells in our bodies continually listen for signals in their local environment and then make appropriate decisions for proper body functionality. A major challenge in current biomedical research is to understand the language of this listening in terms of the chemical reactions occurring within the cell.

Describing the research, Marc explains that “rather than taking a ‘one piece at a time’ approach to understanding how these complex signal transduction systems work together to create biological function, we consider the system as a whole. Central to this systems biology approach is casting our biological understanding into a mathematical formalism that allows us to use computers and maths to understand how the system works.”

Birtwistle will now represent UCD in the national Roche 'Researcher of the Year' competition to be held in the Westbury Hotel, Dublin on Novenber 25th 2010.

Six graduate and postdoctoral researchers impressed the judging committees during the themed moderated poster sessions and received prizes for delivering concise overviews of their work during the five minute time limits imposed. They were: Dr Viviana Marzaioli for Histamine contributes to inflammatory joint disease by regulating the expression of RANKL and OPG through altered NR4A activity in human chondrocyte cells; Dr Sandra Malynn, The pro-inflammatory cytokine TNF-alpha regulates the expression of the serotonin transporter (SERT) gene in Astrocytes. Melissa Morine for RNA-Seq analysis of TGFb-treated tubular epithelial cells identifies a novel low-expression-level transcriptome and correlation with a transcriptomic signature in human diabetic nephropathy; Karen Harford for Lack of IL-1RI mediated signalling protects against obesity-induced insulin resistance; Lisa Shine, Retinal Progenitor Apoptosis and Aberrant Photoreceptor Morphology Characterise The dying on edge (dye) Zebrafish Mutant; Tauseef Ahmed, Uptake and translocation of yeast-derived glucan microparticles across an in vitro M-cell model. 

Judging moderated scientific posters at the 2010 UCD Conway Festival of Research & Innovation were Dr Orina Belton, Dr Patricia Maguire and Dr Hugh Brady, UCD President.

Delegates at the conference heard keynote lectures from Professor Rosemary O’Connor, University College Cork and Professor Michael White, University of Liverpool. Focusing on a particular signalling pathway that is essential for normal cell growth and survival, Professor O’Connor described how its regulation may be fundamentally disrupted in tumour cells and the potential such regulators may have as cancer therapeutics. Following on from this, Professor White spoke about systems biology approaches that are useful to study cell signalling.

Professor Ruedi Aebersold, ETH Zurich, a pioneer of proteomic and systems biology approaches, delivered the plenary lecture of the 2010 UCD Conway Festival. He described how proteomic experiments can generate complete, reproducible and quantitative data that is ideally suited to support the generation of mathematical models in systems biology research.

The 10th annual UCD Conway Festival of Research & Innovation was sponsored by BioSciences & Roche.