Ms Avril Daly:

If we are going to talk about innovation, it is very important to understand that pharmaceutical companies will become cell and gene therapy companies within the next ten years. This is the way it is going and moving. It is critical for us to get our house in order for this. It will require a little bit of joined-up thinking in interdepartmental work. We can send the committee some interesting examples from other European countries with similar demographics and population sizes. The FinnGen project in Finland is interesting. It looks at how Finland has approached this with similar pockets of population in an urban centre and disparate populations externally. It was able to put together an impressive system by having healthcare work not only with departments of innovation but also with social care across the board. It is set up because of this. It is a good model and there are good models throughout Europe we can certainly look to.