We are delighted to announce that University College Cork (UCC) have joined FutureNeuro as an academic partner. This brings the number of Higher Education Institutes involved in FutureNeuro to six. UCC’s participation in the Centre will initially take the form of Dr. Daniel Costello, a Consultant Neurologist at Cork University Hospital (CUH) and Clinical Senior Lecturer in the Medical School of University College Cork becoming a Funded Investigator.

Dr Costello is clinical lead for the Epilepsy Monitoring Unit at CUH, which provide access to seizure clinics and an epilepsy surgery pathway with ties to Beaumont Hospital which supports all epilepsy patients in the southern region of Cork, Kerry, Tipperary and Waterford.

The addition of Dr. Costello to the FutureNeuro team will allow for expanded recruitment of neurology patients in the Munster region through the appointment of a research nurse based in CUH. They will facilitate the collection of biological samples, including blood, saliva, brain, and skin samples from well phenotyped patients with a range of neurological conditions. This will expand current biomaterial collection efforts into a more formal national clinical genomic and biomarker network, that will in turn facilitate genetic diagnosis, precision therapeutics, and gene discovery in neurological disease in Ireland. Dr. Costello will also input directly into specific FutureNeuro projects and help initiate novel clinical research questions, such as that related to neurodegeneration in chronic refractory epilepsy.

In addition to the project with Dr Danny Costello, we envisage a number of opportunities for joint research with UCC in the fields of adult and paediatric neurology, genomics and microbiome, clinical research and data analytics, expanding on existing relationships with FutureNeuro.