Research and Scholarship

(opens in a new window)Engineering a balance of power

Every time you flick on a light or nudge up the central heating - and even by reading this article on an electronic device - you plug into an energy system that makes modern life work.

Keeping that power supply running effectively – and with it modern life – is a key goal for Professor Mark O’Malley, Professor of Electrical Engineering at UCD, Director of the (opens in a new window)UCD Energy Institute and (opens in a new window)Electricity Research Centre and recipient of over €10 million in research funding in the past five years.

Complex system

We need to be smart about how we source and protect our energy, but it’s a complex system, explains Professor O’Malley. “A century ago people had a little power station nearby and it was local, then slowly but surely over the decades it built up into this enormous connected system,” he says. “Electricity transmission lines, gas pipelines, transport networks and water are now connected to each other across all scales from small to large, and you have regulatory policies, technical issues and consumer preferences feeding into it.”

Improving integration

Professor O’Malley has earned a global reputation for his research on integrating wind power into traditional power systems and is actively involved in many different international bodies and organisations advising on this topic, including the (opens in a new window)International Energy Agency, (opens in a new window)European Research Council, (opens in a new window)European Academy of Sciences Advisory Council, (opens in a new window)Utility Wind Integration Group (UWIG), (opens in a new window)US Department of Energy, (opens in a new window)US National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the (opens in a new window)Energy Foundation.

More recently the double (opens in a new window)Fulbright award winner and Member of the (opens in a new window)Royal Irish Academy has been looking to an even bigger picture. “If we want to put enormous amounts of renewables into the system we can’t just look at the electricity system alone, we have to look at the electricity, heat, transport and water systems,” he says. “In order to get large-scale integration of renewables you need to take the system-level view.”

That insight has spawned several projects ranging from technical solutions to switch between renewable and non-renewable electricity sources for domestic heating to tackling regulatory issues, looking at how policies can be harmonised internationally.

Evolution in flight

A major challenge though is to technically improve the energy system without taking the power offline, which is not an option in today’s energy-hungry world. Professor O’Malley cites the rise of renewable energy as an example. “Wind and photovoltaic (solar) energy connect to the electricity grid through power electronics, but this leads to a system dynamics problem: it was a synchronous power system and now there is more and more non-synchronous generation,” he says. “And changing it is like changing the engine in a Boeing 747 as it is crossing the Atlantic in mid flight – we can’t turn this thing off, we only have one power system, so we are developing ways to evolve it on the fly.”

Balance of power

Energy security is also a key issue – Professor O’Malley points to Ireland, which relies heavily on imports of natural gas yet also has a renewable option in electricity from wind. “A hybrid that can use gas or electricity protects you against serious supply issues and you can also use the most cost-effective when it is available,” he says. “But that leads to an economic question and the actual electricity system itself has to be a dimension bigger, so we work on trying to develop the best case solutions for that, to get the best compromises.”

Meetings of minds

One of the the greatest immediate effects of Professor O'Malley's work is through the researchers who train in his group, he notes. “Those people go out there and they are very knowledgeable.”
And, ever looking to the bigger picture, he is co-founder of the (opens in a new window)International Institute for Energy Systems Integration (opens in a new window)http://iiesi.org/ , a global community looking to develop an efficient world energy system, where Professor O’Malley applies his expertise to large-scale international challenges. "This is a global issue, so we are trying to work together for everyone to bring their proposition to the table - we need to collaborate, and I can bring my experience to that."

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(opens in a new window)Collective advances on breast cancer

It's a sobering estimate, but one in every eight women in the developed world is likely be diagnosed with breast cancer in her lifetime.

Yet while science is getting better at understanding the molecular types of breast cancer and how to treat them, some women receive unnecessary chemotherapy, while some types of breast cancer still defy treatment. Add to the mix that even treatable tumours can develop resistance to treatments over time and there are still plenty of questions to answer about the disease – which is why the BREAST- PREDICT consortium led by UCD wants to tackle them.

"There have been a lot of strides made in diagnostics and new therapeutic options in the breast cancer area, but there are still some challenges," explains William Gallagher, Professor of Cancer Biology at UCD School of Bimolecular and Biomedical Science and a UCD Conway Institute Fellow, who directs the virtual consortium.

Combination of approaches

The five-year (opens in a new window)BREAST-PREDICT Collaborative Cancer Research Centre programme, which is funded by the (opens in a new window)Irish Cancer Society and runs until 2018, involves more than 20 principal investigators around Ireland and provides the framework for collecting information and tumour samples from nearly every breast cancer patient in the country, with their consent. The collective puts a strong emphasis on clinical trials and on combining 'wetlab' biological research with computational methods to understand how the cancer cells control their activities.

Professor Gallagher's work in the consortium has already resulted in two major pipeline findings: an algorithm to help women with breast cancer to avoid receiving unnecessary chemotherapy and new insights into how patients with 'triple-negative' breast cancer are likely to fare.

Predicting for patients

Diagnostic tests help doctors to understand more about the type of breast cancer a patient has and what the appropriate treatment is, yet many women are still treated with chemotherapy they don't need, according to Professor Gallagher.

Working with Dr Adrian Bracken in Trinity College Dublin, he has identified a new 'prognostic signature' in the biochemistry of early-stage breast cancer that has not spread to the lymph nodes. "At the moment tests classify patients with these cancers into low, intermediate and high grades of risk, but our approach classifies the patients more discretely into low or high risk groups with a very high degree of accuracy, we don't have that grey zone in the middle."

Their OncoMasTR technology gets those results by looking at a handful of 'master controllers' of gene expression in the cell. "Our approach classifies a much bigger proportion of patients as low risk, so it provides the basis for a new prognostic tool that should help avoid unnecessary treatments being given, and it also opens doors for prediction of drug responses further down the line, " explains Professor Gallagher, who is Chief Scientific Officer of (opens in a new window)OncoMark, a UCD spin-out company that is bringing the technology towards the clinic.

Tackling the 'triple negative'

Another challenge is 'triple-negative' breast cancer– so-called because the tumours lack certain drug receptors. "It affects 10 to 15 per cent of breast cancer patients, but there are no targeted therapies currently available for triple negative disease, and a big focus of BREAST- PREDICT is to address that," says Professor Gallagher.

The Irish consortium has teamed up with the EU project RATHER (www.ratherproject.com), a network of academic and commercial groups that Professor Gallagher co-ordinates, to discover a new signal in triple-negative cancer cells. "We found that an enzyme called CDK7 is a marker of poor prognosis, and new therapeutic target in triple-negative breast cancer," he explains.

Towards better diagnosis and therapies

BREAST-PREDICT is making strides in several other areas too – such as how cancer cells develop resistance to treatments and even how common medications such as aspirin and statins could affect how aggressive tumours are and how they respond to treatment. "We are building a range of new clinical trials in Ireland driven by BREAST-PREDICT investigators, gathering data from patients over time," says Professor Gallagher. "And the longer-term impact of our findings will be more accurate diagnosis and new therapeutic options for patients."

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(opens in a new window)Healthier foods – a matter of taste

What you eat can have a profound impact on your health. Yet how many times have you shied away from eating a 'healthy' food because it simply didn't taste good?

Professor Dolores O'Riordan , Director of UCD's Institute of Food and Health, is developing new ways of combining food ingredients during formulation so they can deliver a healthy punch without hitting the ropes on taste.

Building blocks

One way to make food products more palatable, more digestible and even more filling is to add new ingredients, but Professor O'Riordan's research takes a different approach: she formulates the existing food structures – the 'macromolecules' of protein, carbohydrates, fats and
water – to reshape the food's taste and behaviour in the body.

She compares the process to architecture: "In architecture you start off with building materials but unless you combine them in certain ways, you don't end up with a magnificent building," she says. "In the same way, we start with the building blocks of foods and combine these macromolecules together to make the nutrients more available to the body, to make ingredients more stable in the food or to fulfil a sensory need."

A matter of taste

Ensuring that consumers enjoy a food product is paramount, she notes, because unless a person is extremely motivated, a bitter or unpleasant taste will put a halt to that food being eaten at all.

Professor O'Riordan's experience in the food industry – working with global clients with Kerry Foods – before forging her senior academic career at UCD taught her the importance of cultural preferences.
But a distaste that many cultures can agree on is rancid oil, and fish oil is a case in point – the fatty acids it contains have been linked to numerous health benefits, but when formulated in foods the oils can quickly become oxidised, leading to a foul taste and smell.
"You really need to protect those oils during food processing," explains Professor O'Riordan. "So we are putting protein coatings around the oils to shield them from exposure to oxygen and so avoid that nasty taste."

Milking benefits

Professor O'Riordan is also applying her expertise to large, State- supported dairy research consortia in Ireland - she is Principal Investigator both in the (opens in a new window)Dairy Processing Technology Centre and at (opens in a new window)Food for Health Ireland, an academic-industry consortium hosted by UCD.

With Ireland's milk production expected to increase vastly due to the removal of EU quotas, both centres want to use milk and its constituents in ways that add more value. That might mean discovering and isolating a 'bioactive' protein in milk that can help control blood sugar or reduce appetite, or to protect muscle mass in the elderly.

But ultimately those ingredients need to be packaged in food or drinks that people want to swallow, notes Professor O'Riordan. "The peptides are quite bitter, so we are trying to create the food structures that will maximise the amount of peptides and minimise the bitter perception," she says.

Hands-on learning

Professor O'Riordan's research also informs her teaching and practical sessions with students at UCD. "The research is incorporated directly into the syllabus, so students get the most up-to-date information," she says. "They also do a hands-on formulation project where they combine ingredients together to create a defined structure. It gives them a good sense of satisfaction when they work out the process and achieve it. It's something you really can't teach, they have got to see how those building blocks interact, and taste it for themselves."

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