Professor Owen Smith:

In answer to where we get research funding, when I came back in 1995 - I had trained in the UK at Great Ormond Street and Royal Free hospitals - I brought back the MRC clinical trials. We started straight away to further recruit patients into the MRC clinical trials and 80% of our patients were entered, which is really fantastic. Over the past 25 years, we have been only second to Birmingham in the UK clinical trials programmes of entry clinical trials. Again, the committee has heard all the good things that can happen from them. Those clinical trials were predominantly phase 3, not phase 1 or phase 2. As Professor Hanna has alluded to, that is where we need to get to. We need more recruitment into the phase 1 and 2 clinical trials because they are the standard of care for tomorrow.

Going forward, as Professor Casey has said, we need some sort of body and several champions - they can be political and leaders in the field of cancer - to bring this forward. That particular group also needs to empower philanthropic sources. We are the worst in the European Union in bringing philanthropy into this form of venture.

The other area I would like to do research in is care. As I said, we need to embolden the research programmes going across the Border between Northern Ireland and Ireland. Lastly, let us get rid of this nonsense about data sharing. Even in the Republic of Ireland, sharing between different hospitals is a nightmare. It should be seamless and it is not. It is dreadful and is holding patient outcomes back.