St. Vincent’s University Hospital specialists to lead major new lung research initiative bringing together 40+ researchers

18th September 2026

58,000 biological samples, 9,000 consented patients and more than 40 clinical trials conducted over the past five years underpin new UCD Lung Centre focused on earlier diagnosis and better treatments for serious lung disease

Respiratory specialists and researchers at St. Vincent’s University Hospital (SVUH) will play a leading role in a major new lung research initiative bringing together more than 40 investigators to accelerate research into some of the most serious chronic respiratory diseases.

The UCD Lung Centre, which launched this morning, will connect frontline patient care and respiratory medicine at St. Vincent’s with laboratory science, engineering, advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence.

The Centre brings together a significant body of research already under way across its partner sites, including more than 58,000 processed biological samples from research studies, 9,000 consented patients, 40 active disease study collections and more than 40 clinical trials conducted over the past five years, alongside partnerships with major international pharmaceutical companies.

Its research will span interstitial lung disease and pulmonary fibrosis, COPD, asthma, pulmonary hypertension and lung cancer.

Professor Cormac McCarthy, Consultant Respiratory Physician at St. Vincent’s University Hospital and Director of the UCD Lung Centre, said the aim is to bring clinical and scientific expertise together around the questions that matter most to patients.

“At St. Vincent’s, we look after patients living with some of the most complex and challenging lung diseases. They are ultimately the reason we do this research.

When you are sitting with a patient whose disease is progressing, the questions are very immediate. Can we diagnose this earlier? Can we predict who is going to deteriorate? Can we find a treatment that will slow or stop their disease? And how quickly can we get promising new treatments from the laboratory into clinical trials and, ultimately, to our patients?

The scale of research we are bringing together is significant but what matters is what we can do with it. Our ambition is to turn that depth of research, data and clinical expertise into earlier diagnoses, better treatments and better outcomes for patients.”

Artificial intelligence and advanced data analysis will form part of the Centre’s work, including medical image analysis, machine-learning predictive diagnostic models, wearable sensor technologies and the integration of different forms of clinical and research data.

A major focus will be translating research findings into clinical care, including identifying new therapeutic targets, improving early detection and diagnostic precision and increasing opportunities for patients to access emerging treatments through clinical trials.

The initiative brings together multidisciplinary expertise across medicine, engineering, biomolecular and biomedical science, mathematics and statistics, biology and environmental science. Research areas include transplantation and fibrosis, the gut-lung axis and microbiota, AI and medical imaging, wearables and remote monitoring, breathomics and digital biomarkers.

The research base underpinning the Centre has produced more than 1,100 peer-reviewed papers over the past five years, attracting almost 38,000 academic citations.

Professor McCarthy continued:

“We are beginning to see real progress in diseases where, not very long ago, treatment options were extremely limited. That makes it even more important that patients in Ireland can participate in high-quality research and have opportunities to access clinical trials.

This isn’t research for research’s sake. The aim is to change what happens for the person sitting in front of us in the clinic.”

The longer-term ambition is to develop a national resource for respiratory research, connecting clinical pulmonary research across Ireland and strengthening Ireland’s participation in major international respiratory research programmes.

UCD also intends to build towards a bid to establish Ireland’s first dedicated National Research Centre for Pulmonary Medicine.

Professor McCarthy opened the Centre’s inaugural meeting at the UCD Conway Institute this morning. He was joined by SVUH clinicians and researchers including Dr Alex Franciosi, Professor Ed McKone, Professor Aurélie Fabre, Professor Eleanor Dunican, Professor Michael Keane, Professor Marcus Butler, Dr Marissa O’Callaghan and Dr David Murphy, alongside Professor Karen Redmond, Professor Sean Gaine and Dr Brian McCullough from Mater Misericordiae University Hospital and colleagues from across UCD, reflecting the breadth of clinical, scientific and research expertise contributing to the new Centre.

ENDS

Notes to editors

• The UCD Lung Centre brings together more than 40 investigators across medicine, engineering, biomolecular and biomedical science, mathematics and statistics, biology, environmental science and related disciplines.
• Across its partner sites, the research underpinning the Centre includes more than 58,000 processed biological samples, 9,000 consented patients and 40 active disease study collections. More than 40 clinical trials have been conducted over the past five years.
• Professor Cormac McCarthy is a Consultant Respiratory Physician at St. Vincent’s University Hospital and Associate Professor of Medicine at University College Dublin. He is Director of the UCD Lung Centre and Director of the Academic Centre for Rare Diseases at UCD.