UCD Researcher wins US-Ireland grant for personalised nutrition project with Harvard and QUB

  • Researchers team up from UCD, Harvard and Queens University Belfast
  • Project funded through the Irish Health Research Board, Public Health Agency and NIH

Dublin, Ireland, 14 October 2019: Professor Lorraine Brennan from University College Dublin is delighted to have been awarded a US-Ireland grant, funded by the Health Research Board (HRB), to the tune of almost €1 million.

The aim of the project – ‘Food-Based Biomarkers, Diet Quality and Cardiometabolic Health’ – is to identify new biomarkers for the intake of specific foods, examine them in relation to coronary heart disease in US patient groups, and evaluate the efficacy of using food biomarker information to help improve diet quality in a personalised nutrition trial.

These projects will be led by a trans-Atlantic team that consists of multiple groups of investigators in the US, Ireland, and Northern Ireland. Primary investigators include Professor Lorraine Brennan (UCD, Ireland), and Professor Jayne Woodside (QUB, Northern Ireland), Associate Professor Qi Sun, Professor Frank Hu and Professor Eric Rimm (Harvard School of Public Health), and Associate Professor Qibin Qi (Albert Einstein College of Medicine).

The kick-off meeting for the project will take place on Monday 14th of October in University College Dublin, where all of the partners will meet to discuss and officially launch the project.

Lorraine Brennan
Lorraine Brennan

Speaking before the launch, Professor Brennan said: “We are delighted to have this opportunity to work with colleagues from the US and Northern Ireland. It’s an important opportunity for us to validate some of the biomarkers we find in European Populations in the US population and to relate them to health outcomes. This grant will allow us to achieve this.”

Professor Brennan’s research in the UCD Institute of Food & Health and UCD Conway Institute involves the development of biomarkers for use in Personalised Nutrition.

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For further information please contact Caroline at caroline.byrne1@ucd.ie or 01-7164005.

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