RCSI and Integra LifeSciences
Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) and leading medical technology firm Integra have enjoyed a longstanding research relationship. In 2015, the company began a fully funded study with RCSI, coordinated through the SFI Centre for Advanced Materials and Bioengineering Research (AMBER) hosted at TCD, to develop new biomaterials-based nerve repair devices. The study sought to address the issue of peripheral nerve injury which remains a major clinical problem and affects more than 1 million patients worldwide annually.
The collaboration has grown to become a co-funded project worth more than €1M and involving PIs Prof Fergal O’Brien from RCSI and Prof Conor Buckley from TCD. Work to date has resulted in the successful development of two technologies, with a third having been recently disclosed, that have been proven highly effective in repairing damaged nerves in pre-clinical trials. Between 2019 and 2020, there were three patent filings and two commercialisation outcomes – an assignment agreement and an option and evaluation agreement.
RCSI and S3 Connected Health
In March 2020, Professor Richard Costello, Professor of Medicine at RCSI, was tasked with developing technology-enhanced care pathways for COVID-19 patients attending Beaumont Hospital. Acutely aware of the lack of Electronic Patient Record infrastructure in the Irish Healthcare System, Professor Costello assembled a multi-disciplinary team including Professor Garrett Greene of the Maths Dept in UCD, Professor Oran Rigby, Consultant Intensivist, and the Dublin-based digital company S3 with a view to working together to develop an easy-to-use mobile application for optimised care.
The result was Enodatis, a web based clinical support tool that incorporates a risk-assessment score for Covid-19 patients which allows healthcare professionals to treat and monitor the progression of their condition. Compared with other established clinical deterioration scores, the risk assessment function in Enodatis, known as the Covid Critical Care Index (CCCI), has been shown to predict with greater accuracy which COVID-19 patients are most at risk of adverse outcomes. CCCI is highly predictive of the need for patient ICU admission over 24 hours in advance and can estimate future ICU bed demand, facilitating earlier and more effective treatment as well as better resourcing and planning during the COVID-19 outbreak. The ability to more accurately stratify patients and predict outcomes helps ensure that valuable and finite resources such as specialist respiratory clinicians, ICU beds and ventilators are utilised optimally, and deployed to treat the patients with the greatest need.