Several expert groups including The American Society of Clinical Oncology, The National Academy of Clinical Biochemistry (USA) and the European Group on Tumour Markers stated that the uPA test may be used for determining prognosis in newly diagnosed breast cancer patients, especially in those women who present with lymph node-negative disease.

The uPA biomarker is from a family of proteases that digest cell barriers and allows tumour cells to metastasise. High levels of uPA point to a stronger likelihood of the patient developing metastasis and requiring chemotherapy as well as surgery to fight the disease. However, if the levels of uPA are found to be low, a combination of surgery and radiotherapy may be sufficient in order to treat the cancer, helping to minimise the expense and the unpleasant side effects of the treatment, for the patient.

Work is continuing across UCD to develop a panel of biomarkers that will further enhance predictive accuracy and improve treatment regimes and clinical outcomes for patients.

Professor William Watson and his team are validating a panel of serum biomarkers to inform surgical intervention for prostate cancer. Working with clinicians at four of Dublin's main urology treatment centres and with national and international collaborators, this research aims to develop a clinically-applicable predictive tool to identify the grade and stage of prostate cancer and inform the clinician and patient of the most appropriate treatment strategy.

The group undertook extensive literature reviews (which were published in Nature Reviews Urology and the BJU International) that systematically identified, for the first time, all the areas of greatest unmet need for biomarkers in prostate cancer.  This set the focus for our biomarker research efforts concentrating on those areas of maximum clinical utility and guides the independent external validation of the panel of proteins by international collaborators in Austria and Australia.

Proteomics and novel bioinformatics analysis were employed to identify lists of potential candidate protein biomarkers with a view to stratifying prostate cancer patients into their appropriate treatment groups.

“There are many hundreds of biomarkers for prostate cancer but only one in clinical use because the others have either not succeeded in the validation phase or were not deemed useful at the bedside” stated Professor William Watson who leads the group and the Irish Prostate Cancer Research Consortium.

“We have taken the approach of firstly identifying the relevant clinical questions and then designing appropriate discovery and validation efforts with a clearly defined comparison population using carefully calibrated and standardised collection, storage and processing protocols.”

This multi-faceted, but unified approach is placing Irish-based prostate cancer research in the forefront of many international prostate cancer research interests.

Professor Doug Veale and his colleagues at St Vincent's University Hospital are focused on clinical research into early inflammatory arthritis - RA, psoriatic arthritis and related psoriasis. The unit has an international reputation for studies based on well-defined inflammatory arthritis cohorts.

Their translational research focus is on angiogenesis and vascular biology, in collaboration with Ursula Fearon, Jacintha O'Sullivan and Cormac Taylor.  They are examining the role of hypoxia on joint inflammation, mitochondrial bioenergetics, tissue perfusion and genomic instability.

The group has combined high-quality clinical cohort studies with novel arthroscopic and high-end imaging technologies to study synovial tissue in vivo macroscopically, ex vivo and at the cellular and molecular level. Recent publications focus on the regulation of angiogenesis by growth factors and cytokines, the effect of novel TNF targetted therapy and novel studies examining the relationship of biomarkers with clinical and imaging measures such as dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DEMRI).