Ms Eibhlin Mulroe:

I should have raised this when I spoke earlier. We produced a DKM report in 2016 that we shared with this committee. It showed that within the clinic, when you organise a clinical trial your hospital does not have to pay for the treatments involved in it. That is very often taken on by the sponsor of the clinical trial, especially when it is a pharmaceutical sponsor. In 2016, there were cost savings of €16 million within the HSE's drugs budget. That was just for drugs that were available within the system at the time. It did not include all the advanced innovative therapies that were also being provided through our trials because that is not perceived as a saving. Some €16.5 million in GDP cost savings and 250 jobs were within the ecosystem at the time. I believe that has grown and we need to do a further analysis. We talked to people about that only yesterday.

One of the things InterTradeIreland did in 2014 was to commission its own study. That is how we met. It was in the context of a commission to study and identify clinical trial clusters as an area of interest for cross-Border collaboration. We met and discussed the idea of targeting cancer and we were able to show the data we had from the DKM report. InterTradeIreland has been very important to us in building bridges, talking to one another and getting that US-Ireland collaboration going again in addition to the memorandum of understanding, MOU. As you are all sitting in on this call on both sides of the Border listening to us talk about specific trials, such as the TAILORx trial and Professor Reynolds's Neo-AEGIS oesophageal trial I talked about earlier, it should be borne in mind that all those trials opened on both sides of the Border. In fact, we sponsored some of them to open in the UK. We had patients in Belfast City Hospital, Dublin and Cork. As Professor Gallagher pointed out about the TAILORx trial, we approved, which means recruited, large numbers of patients to that trial. Belfast was one of the top recruiters for the Neo-AEGIS study so it just shows there is major capability on both sides of the Border. I thought I should mention that.