Supervisor View Full Details

• infectious disease and the immune system
• cancer/oncology

• Medicine

• Gastroenterology
• Oncology

My research interests are in the role of innate and adaptive immunity in inflammatory bowel disease (ulcerative colitis and Crohns Disease) and in the importance of the host immune response in gastro-intestinal neoplasia, particularly Colorectal Cancer. With my colleagues at the Centre for Colorectal Disease at SVUH/UCD (www.colorectal.ie) we have an established track record in clinical research on a range of digestive disorders and are actively involved in clinical trials in IBD and Cancer. The Centre for Colorectal Disease was established at St Vincent?s University Hospital in 1993 with the aim of delivering quality care to all patients with colorectal disorders (notably colorectal cancer, inflammatory bowel disease and pelvic floor disorders) while at the same time developing high quality research, teaching and education.
At the core of the Centre is the collaboration between a multidisciplinary clinical team (consisting of colorectal surgeons, medical gastroenterologists, oncologists, pathologists, radiologists and specialist nurses) with our dedicated team of scientific staff.

Current projects include an investigator initiated clinical trial (https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02687724) which examines the effectiveness of personalised therapy for inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) by optimising anti-TNF dosing according to monitoring concentrations of therapeutic antibodies and non-invasive markers of inflammatory burden (faecal calprotectin). There are associated translational studies to understand mechanisms of primary and secondary non-response in Crohn's and Ulcerative colitis and facilitate biomarker discovery (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26332314). Additional projects examine the role of the host immune response in colorectal cancer with a view to understanding the mechanism of tumour mediated immune suppression to devise strategies to boost the host response (http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fonc.2016.00050)