28 January, 2019

CAPPA was one of 27 successful projects to receive funding from the Disruptive Technologies Fund established under Project Ireland 2040.

The Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund, one of the world’s first worth €500 million, is aimed at tackling national and global challenges and a key part of the Government’s “Future Jobs” initiative.

CAPPA was one of 16 organisations awarded funding in the health and wellbeing sector and one out of 5 focusing on diagnostics and therapeutics technologies.

CAPPA received funding as part of a consortium led by Hooke Bio Ltd which includes NUI Galway. The group’s research is based on a high throughput microfluidic drug screening platform.

The Hooke Bio platform is a disruptive technology that will allow pharma companies and clinicians to develop more accurate and responsive disease models for drug testing and may be expanded to testing of existing therapies on individual patient’s disease samples.

This would mean that personalised combination screening could become a reality, removing the element of uncertainty that surrounds chemotherapy. Combination screening and drug repurposing could be used to treat a wide range of diseases such as cancer and heart disease.

The original Hooke Bio platform was restricted by a narrow field of view which limited the testing to one fluidics channel only. Hooke Bio enlisted the help of CAPPA to come up with a bespoke imaging system to create a larger field of view that would allow investigation on multiplexed channels.

CAPPA will be focusing on developing advanced optics for the system, along with their colleagues in National University of Ireland Galway. The consortium was awarded €1.9 million in funding, with just over €0.5 million being awarded to CAPPA for the period 2019 to 2021.

CAPPA’s Dr Liam Lewis and Dr Milosz Pryjalgowski were heavily involved in the project from the offset. Dr Liam Lewis said, “We are delighted to receive this funding to continue to work with Hooke Bio on the development of their new platform”.