BioWorld International Correspondent

DUBLIN, Ireland - By late spring, Science Foundation Ireland's grant approvals for basic research spending will have reached some €200 million in less than two years.

Late last month, SFI allocated €43.4 million in research funding to 45 principal investigators and their teams. It is in the process of selecting the first colleges that will receive awards under its Centres for Science, Engineering, and Technology program, which is intended to establish centers for advanced research with substantial industrial involvement. They will receive between €1 million and €5 million per year, up to 10 years.

SFI was set up in 2000 through a recommendation that Ireland adopt information technology and life sciences as its main research priorities and it funded its first project teams the following year. The initiative, which has an initial budget of €635 million through 2006, was designed to strengthen the science base underpinning areas of industrial importance and to attract overseas firms to locate research and development activities in Ireland. (See BioWorld International, Aug. 1, 2001.)

"There are some people who are seriously interested," SFI's biotechnology and biology division director John Atkins told BioWorld International. Atkins returned to Ireland to head SFI's life sciences effort after spending much of his career in the U.S. He was formerly research professor of human genetics at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and also worked at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.

While many of SFI's funding activities are nondirected and are determined by the quality of the proposals it receives, the agency also is formulating an agenda of its own, which is influenced, Atkins said, by the companies that are important to Ireland. "There are one or two areas where we have a definite incentive to become strong in," Atkins said. "SFI has a real role in trying to catalyze this."

SFI also is involved in an initiative to create a three-way research partnership between the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and the U.S. Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., and Rita Colwell, director of the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Va., are co-chairs of the 10-person task force. The body is preparing a document that will set out a framework for supporting collaborations between researchers in Ireland and the U.S. It is believed to have identified cystic fibrosis and diabetes research as its priorities in the life sciences field.