Dr Stephen Fitzsimons successful Beacon Collaborative Grant 2025 Awardee
Monday, 20 October, 2025
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UCD Health Affairs and the Beacon Hospital have established two distinct seed grants of €20,000 each to foster pioneering research collaborations. This funding aims to support innovative research initiatives across high-impact areas such as cardiology, oncology, orthopaedics, physiotherapy, and other emerging fields of interest. By leveraging UCD’s academic excellence and the Beacon Hospital’s clinical expertise, the hope is that this investment will address healthcare challenges and improve patient outcomes through cutting-edge research and development.
Congratulations to UCD School of Medicine’s Dr Stephen Fitzsimons (Marie Curie Research Fellow), Co-PI for ‘Development of a plasma-based companion diagnostic for coronary artery disease’. Dr Fitzsimons joins Lead PIs, Prof David Burke (Beacon Hospital) and Prof Orina Belton (UCD School of Biomolecular and Biomedical Science).
Coronary artery disease (CAD) is detected using angiography where percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) is performed in patients with >70% stenosis. It is estimated that over 60% who undergo angiography, an invasive procedure, do not require PCI1. This highlights the need for better non-invasive diagnostics to determine stenosis severity.
This group have identified extracellular vesicle (EV)-derived plasma-based markers that are correlated with CAD stenosis severity in an early phase discovery study (n=64). Here, we aim to validate our findings in a larger clinical cohort (n=300/group) and develop a diagnostic score to assess stenosis severity, facilitating triage of patients.
Congratulations to the other successful team for their project ‘AI-Assisted Skin Cancer Screening through Tattooed Skin’. Find out more here.