Professor William Gallagher:

I will take the first question. It is critical to have appropriate public and patient involvement. It is becoming increasingly important. To a certain degree, in the past, scientific research, certainly the kind of research I do in a laboratory setting, was not very patient-facing and we did not really interact that heavily. Obviously, the kind of research Professor Lowery was doing, because that was with a patient, is closer to the person. That has changed over recent years. I will give a good example driven by a colleague of mine, Professor Amanda McCann in UCD. This whole initiative started with a conversation that Mr. Briscoe and I had at a meeting called The Patient Voice in Cancer Research about three years ago. This initiative was essentially an idea whereby we gather together researchers and a group of patients with a lived experience of cancer. In that case, these were researchers who would not normally interact with patients. This was done to have a two-way dialogue. We have been going through this evolution over a number of years as to how we appropriately communicate our research and understand patient needs. It is a matter of having that conversation and two-way dialogue. I will give the committee a link to the YouTube video so members can watch it later. Margaret Grayson, who is also on our committee, is a very strong patient advocate who has been at the centre of a lot of driving forward of cancer research programmes. It is critical we have that.

That is at the patient level, but I think part of Mr. Molloy's question was about wider public engagement. That is important, not just for cancer research but for awareness of science in general. People now know what PCR, antigen tests and sequencing are, for example. That is what we do on a day-to-day basis in cancer research. The foundations of those technologies are in cancer research. The technology for the Human Genome Project started in cancer research labs. That conversation about the use of science has not really been heard in an Irish context. That is starting to change, and Covid has had an impact. We now need to go forward. There is also an onus on the research community to become better at communication. It is up to us to communicate. It is a two-way system.

I will make another comment and Professor Lowery might come in on it. We talk about ten academic institutions. Each of those institutions has a natural affiliation with a clinical partner. UCD, for example, has an interaction with St. Vincent's Hospital and the Mater Hospital, while Trinity College interacts with St. James's Hospital. Each academic institution has an affiliation with a specific key clinical partner. That is strong in order to reinforce those close academic links. Professor Lowery might talk about, for example, the Trinity St. James's Cancer Institute, which has now gone a step further in the Organisation of European Cancer Institutes, OECI, accreditation process. Fundamentally, what we are talking about in AICRI is stepping beyond even that and providing a framework whereby those institutions come together, both the academic institutions and their affiliated clinical institutions, as one whole entity. I do not know if Professor Lowery wishes to comment on that.