BioWorld International Correspondent

Procter & Gamble Co. and French pharmaceutical companies Servier and Aventis SA are among the first overseas industrial partners to participate in a new university-industry R&D program funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), the government agency charged with boosting Ireland's research capabilities in biotechnology and information technology.

SFI last week unveiled its first three Centers for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET), campus-based centers of excellence that are required to have a strong industrial involvement, including 20 percent backing from participating companies. Two of them are focused on life sciences research.

Servier, of Neuilly-sur-Seine, and Aventis, of Strasbourg, both feature in the lineup at a newly established €13.5 million national center for human proteomics at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI). P&G, of Cincinnati, is involved with a €16.5 million alimentary probiotics center at University College Cork (UCC).

Teagasc, the state agricultural research institute, and Alimentary Health Ltd., a campus company that has grown out of probiotic research at UCC, also are participants in the latter center, which is headed by Fergus Shanahan.

The proteomics center features two Dublin-based firms, pharmacogenomics services company Surgen Ltd. and microfluidics specialist Allegro Technologies Ltd., plus the German biotechnology firm Protagen AG, of Dortmund. The German link came about through the newly appointed center director, Dolores Cahill, who is returning to Ireland after almost a decade in Germany. A co-founder of Protagen, Cahill spent seven years at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, most recently as leader of its protein technologies group.

The RCSI center, she told BioWorld International, will provide an opportunity to marry proteomics with clinical research. "Really, it's setting up proteomics platform technologies in a clinical and medical environment." Cahill is an expert in the use of protein array technology for high-throughput expression profiling and has licensed technology to Protagen, which the center can access. Its initial clinical focus will be on cardiovascular research. Servier plans to establish its own lab at the RCSI, Cahill said, and both drug firms will supply expertise in drug design and development. The center will also play a role in attracting top-class international proteomics researchers to Ireland, Cahill said, as the country's existing capabilities had been spread around several centers. "This would focus it in one national center," she said.

SFI has an overall budget of €635 million to allocate to biotechnology and IT research during the 2000-06 period. Its first three centers of excellence were selected from 23 proposals. A second call under the same program, which closes on May 9, has elicited 37 expressions of interest.