OncoMark, the life sciences company whose vision is to make a mark in the fight against cancer, today announced that Dr Dara FitzGerald has been appointed CEO. Dr FitzGerald, who has 20 years of experience in the IT and biotechnology sectors, plans to drive and accelerate the company’s growth and development.   

Dr Dara FitzGerald, OncoMark's newly appointed CEO

OncoMark currently provides a range of scanning and screening services and employs 9 people between its headquarters in NovaUCD, the Innovation and Technology Transfer Centre and laboratory facilities in UCD’s Conway Institute. With the appointment of Dr FitzGerald the company plans to be employing 20 people within the next 2 years. 

OncoMark, which recently secured over €2 million in research funding from European Framework 7 Programmes, is dedicated to the discovery and development of novel diagnostics and therapeutics that help to improve the quality of life of cancer patients.  

Currently 1 in 3 people in Europe and the US will develop cancer at some point during their lifetime. This rate is expected to increase due to the aging population in the developed world. While the management of cancer patients has improved significantly, the availability of reliable indicators, or biomarkers, of the therapeutic response and prognosis for cancer treatments is a key outstanding issue. 

OncoMark’s primary focus is on the discovery of reliable cancer biomarkers and the development and provision of automatic and high-throughput multi-marker assays or tests. Such tests will improve the monitoring of the therapeutic response in patients undergoing anti-cancer therapy.

OncoMark’s immediate commercial focus is on an image analysis toolkit, IHC-MARK. IHC-MARK provides an automated and non-supervised assessment of biomarkers which are important in cancer diagnostics. The development of this tool-kit represents a key step towards rapid high-throughput, tissue-based diagnostics. 

OncoMark was co-founded by Professor William Gallagher and Steve Penny in 2007 as a spin-out company from the UCD School of Biomolecular and Biomedical Science.

Dr Dara FitzGerald has worked in IT and biotechnology applications for almost 20 years and he established BioResearch Ireland's Imaging Research Group in 1996. In 1999, he co-founded PixAlert, an IT company providing digital risk management solutions, and remained with the company until 2005.

He subsequently provided business expertise support to a number of early stage and scaling companies. From 2007 to 2009, he acted as the US Federal Liaison for Enterprise Ireland and was based in Washington DC (National Institutes of Health) and Dublin. Prior to joining OncoMark, he was a Commercial Development Associate at the National Digital Research Centre responsible for the commercialisation of company and academic research.

He graduated with a BSc and PhD in Biology and IT (image analysis applications) from NUI Maynooth and University College Cork, respectively.

ENDS

24 November 2010

For further information contact Micéal Whelan, NovaUCD, e: miceal.whelan@ucd.ie, , t: +353 (0)1 716 3712.

Editor’s Notes

OncoMark was co-founded by Professor William Gallagher and Steve Penny in 2007 as a spin-out company from the UCD School of Biomolecular and Biomedical Science. OncoMark’s primary focus is on the discovery of reliable cancer biomarkers and the development and provision of automatic and high-throughput multi-marker assays or tests. These tests will improve the monitoring of the therapeutic response in patients undergoing anti-cancer therapy. OncoMark already provides customers with a range of scanning and screening services and has developed an image analysis toolkit for the assessment of IHC (immunohistochemistry)-based markers.  

NovaUCD, the Innovation and Technology Transfer Centre, is the hub of knowledge transfer activities at University College Dublin. NovaUCD is responsible for the commercialisation of intellectual property arising from UCD research and for the development of co-operation with industry and business. NovaUCD as a purpose-built centre also nurtures new technology and knowledge-intensive enterprises such as OncoMark. NovaUCD has been funded through a unique public-private partnership that includes AIB Bank, Arthur Cox, Deloitte, Enterprise Ireland, Ericsson, Goodbody Stockbrokers, UCD and Xilinx.