PhD Stratified Medicine

The Northern Ireland Centre for Stratified Medicine (NICSM) was established in Autumn 2013 to focus on better approaches for the treatment of a range of degenerative and metabolic diseases including heart disease, diabetes, cancers, mental health, arthritis and neuromuscular disease.

Stratified medicine (also known as personalised or precision medicine) is an approach, which subdivides patients into groups based on their risk of developing specific diseases or their response to particular therapies. Stratified medicine is recognised as a key global priority for healthcare providers, pharmaceutical and diagnostic industries and patients. The ultimate aim of a stratified approach to medicine is to enable healthcare professionals to provide the 'right treatment, for the right person, at the right time.'

Stratified Medicine relies on using biological markers to separate patients into specific groups for diagnosing and treating disease at much earlier time points than currently possible. In order to realise the potential benefits of stratified medicine, advances in technologies and systems are required to reliably predict disease, select the best treatment and reduce side effects for each individual patient.

Multi-disciplinary collaboration between the research groups is strongly encouraged and is widespread with research into, for instance, anti-diabetic and antioncogenic aspects of nutrition, the genomics of vitamin receptors, visual deterioration or cancer, imaging of neovascularisation. Our research investigates the interaction between cardiovascular disease and vision and the impact of health and disease, diet, diabetes on dementia, hypertension, vascular and inflammatory disease, to name a few.

In practice, the research groups collaborate both internally and internationally on a range of prioritized multi-disciplinary themes in: ageing, drug discovery and delivery, personalized medicine and genomic medicine. There is also opportunity to undertake research in a number of multi-disciplinary research areas, which combine cutting edge Biomedical Sciences research with psychology, computing and engineering and computational biology. The BMSRI has strong collaborations with regional and global pharmaceutical and diagnostics companies and many of our graduates and postgraduates gain employment in the pharma, diagnostics and health care sectors as well as academia.

PhD graduates are recognised by employers to hold valuable transferrable skills, as the nature of the degree trains candidates in creativity, critical inquiry, problem solving, negotiation skills, professionalism and confidence. The most recent Ulster survey of PhD graduates found that 92% had secured employment within the first year since graduation (HESA Destination of Leavers Survey 2015), and while two thirds end up in the Higher Education or Research sectors, the range of skills acquired equips the remainder for employment in a wide range of contexts.