The Caroline Foundation Research Fellow has been appointed for 2014 –  Dr. Norma O’Donovan took up the post on 01 January 2014.

Dr. Norma O’Donovan obtained her PhD from University College Cork in 1998, and conducted her postdoctoral training in University Hospital Bern, Switzerland. She subsequently returned to Ireland as a postdoctoral scientist in St. Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin, and also spent some time working with the Health Research Board. Since 2004, she has been employed as a Senior Scientist at the National Institute for Cellular Biotechnology (www.nicb.ie) in Dublin City University. Her research focusses on targeted therapies for cancer, in particular breast cancer and melanoma.

She is also involved in the Science Foundation Ireland funded Strategic Research Cluster, Molecular Therapeutics for Cancer Ireland (www.mtci.ie) and Breast-Predict, an Irish Cancer Society Collaborative Cancer Research Centre. Dr. O’Donovan has published 44 research articles in international peer reviewed journals and is an active member of the All-Ireland Cooperative Oncology Research Group (www.icorg.ie), participating in several breast cancer clinical trials.

Update October 2014

There are currently 9 breast cancer clinical trials open in Ireland (run by ICORG,www.icorg.ie) – St Vincent’s are participating in all of these trials

  • In addition to supporting the clinical trials team at St Vincent’s, CCRT also supports lab research in St Vincent’s, UCD, RCSI and DCU.
  • The Caroline Foundation supports a senior scientist, Norma O’Donovan, at Dublin City University. Dr O’Donovan is supervising a team of 9 cancer researchers at the National Institute for Cellular Biotechnology, DCU (4 of the 9 are funded partly/fully by CCRT, www.ccrt.ie) – the team includes postgraduate students, postdoctoral scientists and a research assistant.
  • The focus of the research is on developing new targeted therapies for cancer and identifying biomarkers to help determine which drugs will benefit individual patients. For example, by studying how tumour cells become resistant to current therapies they can identify new targets and test new treatments that may overcome drug resistance. The group are currently testing 6 new drugs in breast cancer cells in the lab and performing biomarker tests on patient samples from 2 breast cancer clinical trials. The drugs which produce the most promising results in the lab will be progressed into clinical trials in breast cancer patients.

“We need to continue to raise funds to ensure that  Dr. O’Donovan’s research be enabled to continue beyond December 2014 – to be given reasonable time to reap rewards.”test-tube