Congratulations to Professor Cormac Taylor and his team on being awarded close to €1.2 million over 5 years in SFI Frontiers for the Future funding.
Prof Taylor’s project investigates new cellular complex which promotes glucose metabolism in normal and cancer cells.
Cancer cells have developed the capacity to live off sugar/glucose rather than oxygen and this makes them a formidable foe. In recent work published by a PhD student, Dr. Sarah Kierans, researching in Prof Taylor’s lab, the team were able to identify a new mechanism by which cancer cells can do this, by forming a glucose consuming complex that they term the Glycoplex. Understanding how tumour cells utilise glucose in this way to survive will allow the team to identify new therapeutic targets for the treatment of cancer.
The SFI Frontiers for the Future programme ‘enables research ideas to contribute new knowledge, solving problems faced by our society, while also providing a continuum of support from early career to established researchers, thus growing and retaining top talent in Ireland’.
On receiving the award, Prof Taylor says, ‘‘This SFI funding will allow my lab to pursue, with laser focus, the nature of how tumour cells can live off glucose rather than oxygen, and therefore, identify new therapeutic targets for cancer’’.
We wish Prof Taylor and the team all the very best with this important research.
Photo (L-R): Dr. Mykyta Malkov, Prof. Cormac Taylor , Dr. Sarah Kierans, Mr. Darragh Flood