Collaboration In the Development Of Personalised Medicine as a New DisciplinE (ONE)
Our team was founded in 2013 at the Magee Campus. We are based at the Clinical Translational Research and Innovation Centre, a unique tri-partite partnership between the Western Health and Social Care Trust, Derry City and Strabane District Council, and UU which aims to promote community health, accessibility, collaboration, innovation and regional development. Education and training are recognised as the central tenet of improving opportunities and growth in the region.
Our remit was to establish innovative research, undergraduate and postgraduate curricula in Stratified/Personalised Medicine. With shared vision and values, we developed first-in-sector courses in an emerging discipline, harnessing transdisciplinary skills in biomedical, clinical and data science to improve prediction, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease. The fundamental aim was to address training needs in the life sciences sector, recognising that biologically and clinically-informed, computationally literate graduates were, and remain, urgently needed to handle the complex data requirements of modern medicine. A need identified by the Academy of Medical Sciences and amplified by Government, NHS and economic reports.Engagement with stakeholders identifies skills gaps and informs curricula refinement of research-informed programmes with transdisciplinary real-world skillsets.
We came together from disparate, traditional disciplines, in collaborative partnership, to advance Personalised Medicine as a new discipline, with employability and student experience at its core. Adoption of a distributed leadership model has facilitated career progression from junior academic positions into senior roles. Our impact and mission are to increase aspirations and outcomes for students on the global stage and make a lasting contribution to society.