At the time, Taylor - a UCD graduate - was a biomedical researcher at Harvard University. He and some American friends had set up a band, The Grass Cowboy, and were asked to play at an academic conference in Boston. In the audience that night was Dr Hugh Brady, who got to know Taylor and convinced him to come home to Ireland to further his career in scientific research.
It’s a career that started in 1992 when Taylor embarked on a PhD at UCD’s Pharmacology Department, where he discovered the pharmacological mechanism of berberine, an ancient Chinese remedy used to counteract bowel complaints.
In between experiments Taylor set up his first band, This Black Cactus, with other science and engineering students and played frequent gigs at Dublin’s Rock Garden, but they broke up when Taylor moved to the US to work with Dr Sean Colgan in Harvard, who recruited the UCD graduate as his first post-doc. It’s a career move that Taylor doesn’t regret: “One of the pieces of advice I’d give to people is to get in with somebody young and hungry rather than one of these big, established labs.”
While in Boston, Taylor became interested in looking at oxygen and how it relates to cell function. “In a number of diseases like cancer or chronic inflammation, the oxygen level in the tissue drops,” he says. “The tissue responds by switching on genes that are directed to getting oxygen back into the tissue quickly.”
While this adaptive system is designed to get oxygen back into the tissue, in cancer it can help tumours survive. To understand the process, Taylor studied the molecular mechanisms of how cells respond to hypoxia, where oxygen demand outstrips supply.
When Taylor left Ireland in 1996, there had been little scope for pursuing scientific research, but he says that four years later, Dr Hugh Brady assured him that the funding landscape was changing here: “He was able to convince me – and it has come to pass – that there was a buzz in investment in research, that it was tangible.”
So in 2001, Taylor took up a post at the former Department of Medicine and Therapeutics at University College Dublin, now the UCD School of Medicine and Medical Science, which he admits was a leap of faith at the time. “I could see the potential that there was going to be an investment, and I think it was a little bit of a gamble, but it seemed there was a real interest in developing research as a serious business in Ireland.”
And when his research group moved into the state-of-the-art UCD Conway Institute two years later, he knew he had backed the right horse.
Today, he leads a nine-strong research team that looks at how cells in the intestine respond to oxygen deficit and how it affects drug uptake from the gut. In particular, he wants to develop effective ways of targeting drugs to areas of the intestine damaged by disease by taking advantage of differing permeability in the gut wall.
“For example, in Crohn’s disease the patches of intestinal tissue which are inflamed are hypoxic, so to deliver drugs to those areas we could use a formulation that’s selectively taken up in that tissue,” says Taylor.
To do this, his research group has developed a realistic, lab-based model that uses an oxygen-controlled chamber to investigate how oxygen levels affect the gut’s permeability to orally-administered drugs.
It’s an approach that attracted the attention of Dublin-based company Sigmoid Biotechnologies, who have teamed up with Taylor’s lab to test their new drug formulation, LEDDS. “It’s an oral-controlled release technology for drugs that are optimally formulated as liquid or emulsion drugs - so basically drugs with solubility and/or permeability issues,” says Sigmoid CEO and UCD pharmacology graduate Dr Ivan Coulter.
He says the proprietary technology, which he estimates will be worth €12.5m within five years of launch, aims to make a wide range of drugs more bioavailable and also more convenient for patients.
The collaboration came about through academic-industry meetings organised by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), who went on to support the partnership through an Industry Research Partnership Supplement grant of €134,000 that augments Taylor’s core SFI funding (see panel).
According to Taylor, it’s a mutually beneficial, synergistic matching. “Sigmoid get us to test their formulations and we get to understand how changes in epithelial physiology alter drug uptake. That is really important because we have all these really great drugs but if you can’t get them to where they are needed in the body, it’s not much use.”
In addition to his own research and collaborations, Taylor is also head of the vascular biology strand within the UCD Conway Institute. “My ethos in heading up the strand is that we have to value productivity and that’s predominantly measured by publications and funding brought in. So if we can get people who are well published and well funded together and get added value then that would be a big step forward.”
In the meantime, he continues to forge his musical career playing solo gigs around Dublin, and he’s happy to be back working in Ireland.
“I didn’t come back to set my roots down – I thought I’d come back for three or four years and probably go to Europe. But I’m pleasantly surprised to still be here, and part of that is because of SFI and a huge part of that is because of the new developments in UCD which give a voice to young researchers. They put a value on research and it has made it a very attractive place to work for a relatively young researcher.”
Science Foundation Ireland
Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), which is funded by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, awards grants for basic research that underpins the biotechnology or information and communications technology (ICT) sectors.
In addition to investing in basic research, they also promote appropriate links between their funded researchers and industry, says SFI Programme Officer Dr Ruth McCaffrey.
“If there’s a synergy between our researchers and industry, we encourage them to collaborate,” says Dr McCaffrey, who explains that the Industry Research Partnership Supplement provides funds to facilitate that teamwork.
The industry supplement programme is open to researchers who are currently funded by SFI, and the proposed collaboration must fulfil certain criteria to be eligible for the additional funding. See www.sfi.ie for more details.