Professor Owen Smith:

I will just comment on the Deputy’s last question on funding. We had a bit about CAR T today, and these are incredibly expensive therapeutics. They cost in the region of €500,000 a pop.

That is really led by big pharma companies around the world. In the last three years, a group of us, North and South, have come together to develop what we call the Irish Medicines - Personalised Advanced Cellular Therapies, IMPACT, centre programme. It is where we develop academic chimeric antigen receptors, CARs, for around €60,000 as opposed to €500,000. That is with Research Ireland at the moment. That will develop a programme, North and South, to deliver these therapeutics. It is not just in the cancer space. It is also in the auto-immune and infectious disease spaces. We would like the committee's support on that. It is with Research Ireland at the moment and we hope to see a positive outcome in early December to develop that. It is €100 million.