International award for Ennis cardiologist

AN Ennis cardiologist has made history by becoming the first Irish person to win an international award for groundbreaking work carried out on heart muscle recovery at University College Cork.
Dr John O’Sullivan, an MMI clinician scientist fellow, won the Young Investigator Award at the American College of Cardiology meeting in New Orleans recently.
The Young Investigator competes in open international competition with the best cardiac research projects from around the world.
The award-winning work was carried out in the laboratory of Professor Noel Caplice at the Centre for Research in Vascular Biology at UCC.
Funded by MMI and Science Foundation Ireland, the research described, for the first time, the dramatic effects a single low dose of insulin-like growth factor has on heart muscle recovery after a major heart attack.
More than a million people each year develop heart failure after serious heart attacks, despite the best available therapy.
This work was performed in collaboration with colleagues from the Department of Biochemistry at UCC, headed by Professor Rosemary O’Connor.
The collaborative effort has also recently been awarded about €1 million in additional funding over the next four years to take this therapy to patients who have experienced a serious heart attack and have poor heart function at the time of initial treatment.
It is hoped that, if successful, this therapy can be developed and commercialised in Ireland.
Dr O’Sullivan recently won the JCI Outstanding Young Person of the Year Award 2011 in the Medical Innovation category, as recognition of contributions to research and winning such a prestigious reward (ACC YIA 2011). He will now be entered for the international award in this category. The national ceremony takes place in June.
His research project involved pre-clinical models of heart attacks on a large animal model, where the team induced a heart attack. They then delivered therapy, insulin-like growth factor-1, into the territory of the heart attack.
They had an acute 24-hour and chronic two-month model, in which they examined heart function and heart attack size. A single low dose insulin-like growth factor-1 administration in the hours after a heart attack was found to be able to reduce infarct size by up to 50% at two months post-heart attack and improve heart function to almost pre-heart attack performance.
Dr O’Sullivan said he has always tried to keep up to date on emerging therapies for heart attacks in the medical literature. Following the emergence of a new form of cellular therapy, he said that while he was working in Cork University Hospital he was fortunate that renowned clinician-scientist, Professor Noel Caplice had just come back from the Mayo Clinic. He was very receptive to undertaking the research.
Professor Caplice commented, “This is a fantastic achievement for a young Irish researcher and to my knowledge is the first time a researcher based in Ireland has won this prestigious prize”.
Dr O’Sullivan said he couldn’t have completed his extensive research without the support of his wife, Jessica; father, Dermot, who is well known in the local motor trade; mother, Nuala; sister, Eilis and brother, Dermot Junior, who were thrilled with his success.
Having attended St Flannan’s College, John studied medicine at NUI Galway. After qualifying, he did his internship in medicine and surgery in UCHG and was also senior house officer there. He served as a cardiology registrar in CUH, Cork in 2005 and then as specialist registrar in cardiology in Dublin. He received his membership of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland in 2006.
Dr O’Sullivan will return to clinical practice as a cardiology specialist registrar in the Mater Hospital, Dublin in July and will then pursue an advanced interventional coronary and peripheral fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, which is Harvard’s teaching hospital.