Professor William Gallagher:

I would like to elaborate a bit more on what we are trying to achieve with the US-Ireland. It is not just US-Ireland; it is internationalisation. Cancer research is an international activity. For example, Ireland invests in the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon. I completed a term on a scientific council as the Irish representative for that. It is an amazing initiative, where you can look at cancer in a long-term perspective, and there are inputs from about 25 countries worldwide in that programme.

We have people from Ireland in that programme, and working in the top cancer research institutions worldwide. I will give a couple of examples. Eileen O'Reilly, who just recently won the Burkitt medal, the yearly medal given by Trinity College Dublin which is named after Denis Burkitt. Members have probably heard of the term Burkitt's lymphoma. Denis Burkitt was an Irish medical doctor who originally started in engineering and transitioned from engineering to medicine. The Burkitt medal is a very prestigious award, and Eileen O'Reilly is a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering, one of the top cancer centres worldwide. What is particularly interesting is that if you look at the population - and Professor Lowery will probably know the statistics of it - of medical oncologists in Ireland, and where they have trained, pretty much all of them have been trained at the top ten centres worldwide. We have a hugely enriched proportion of people coming from the best institutions worldwide. Ultimately, it is about making sure they have that environment to come back to as well.