Professor Mark Lawler:

One of the things we did just before lockdown is that Ms Mulroe and I were in the National Cancer Institute in Washington and we also presented on the US-Ireland bipartite agreement. We certainly got a very good reception in respect of the concept of the AICRI but also the opportunity to contribute and compete for part of the funding for that. My understanding, and maybe this is where the committee can help us, is that that fund is going to be continued but also potentially expanded. We have cancer projects within that, and I am involved in one with the Royal College of Surgeons Ireland and GE Healthcare in the US, but there should be more of them. They have proven themselves to be very effective and we should look to expand them, and having more cancer projects would be part of that. If we were looking at an ask, we would certainly be looking at that and at what the opportunities might be in regard to the research that we are doing together. There are good examples where we have shown we can work together and it is about looking to expand those opportunities.

The training piece is very important as well, to come back to Dr. Farry’s question. It is about ways in which we can give innovative training so that some of our younger people can really get that opportunity to spend time. For example, we have a PhD programme at the moment where our students go from Queen’s to the National Cancer Institute, NCI - they do a masters in Queen's and they then spend three years at the NCI. We would like to expand that to be an all-island programme, which would be a great example of how we work together. That is actually how people work together. It is when students are working with each other that the principal investigators also work with each other, so it is almost a cycle of innovation and of bringing people together. That would certainly be an example of something we would like to bring onto an all-island basis.