Garry Duffy says that entrepreneurship should be taught at an undergraduate level.

Ireland is doubling down on building a strong research-to-market pipeline in the hopes of creating innovative global companies with homegrown roots.

To do this, Research Ireland has tapped leading universities across the country to deliver what its CEO, Diarmuid O’Brien, calls “one of the most proactive, imaginative and potentially disruptive programmes” in its history.

Last year, the Government announced three hubs to act as a funding mechanism, support system and testing ground for researchers attempting to commercialise their ideas.

Academics need this kind of support, says Garry Duffy, the director of the ARC Hub for Healthtech at the University of Galway, which officially launched just last month.

“Commercialisation is generally new to people – particularly researchers. And it’s a new language and it’s a new acumen, and you have to try and build that. And that’s what we’re really trying to do with the ARC Hub,” Duffy says. ARC, quite aptly, stands for ‘Accelerating Research to Commercialisation’.

With a backing of €34.3m from the Irish Government and the EU, the ARC health-tech hub is co-run by Atlantic Technological University and RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences, with other major institutions also taking part.

The Government announced two other hubs last year as well, one for therapeutics and one for ICT, boasting a combined funding that exceeded €60m.

The idea behind the hubs is to create a nurturing environment for entrepreneurial scientists and engineers to carry out research that will lead to commercial impact.

Duffy cites Dublin start-up ProVerum as a success story he would like to replicate in the health-tech hub he leads.

The 2016-founded Trinity College Dublin spin-out is the creator behind ‘ProVee’, a minimally invasive solution for treating benign prostatic hyperplasia.

ProVerum raised $80m in a Series B round last August. The start-up’s co-founder Ríona Ní Ghriallais is on the ARC health-tech advisory board.

The ARC Hub for Healthtech launched last month, with 23 projects across major areas – including sensors, implantables and AI – already in the pipeline.

Researchers, with the help of industry professionals, are creating commercial solutions for health issues such as hypertension management, ovarian cancer and falls among the elderly, Duffy says. Some projects have already generated clinical evidence to support the future impact of the various technologies.

The health-tech hub is also inviting around 22 new projects in its second call, which would give a total of around 45 projects under its remit.

Peter Power, the head of the European Commission Representation in Ireland, called the ARC Hub for Healthtech an “operation of strategic importance”, while Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science James Lawless, TD said that he believes the hub “has the potential to deliver game changing acceleration of research commercialisation”.

Duffy believes entrepreneurship should be taught to students early on in their higher education. Hackathons and labs that nurture students to think commercially have had a positive impact, he notes.

“I feel like we’re evolving into a nice ecosystem in Ireland where it’s becoming a bit of a norm to think of a spin-out company as an outcome for university education.”

Duffy is a professor at the University of Galway, and head of the anatomy and regenerative medicine department at RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences.

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