Professor William Gallagher:

At our Boston event in November, we have people like Laura MacConaill, who works in Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a top centre. She is a scientist who leads their precision medicine programme, and she delivers the technologies for precision medicine. We have Sharon Cunningham, an entrepreneur from Shorla Pharma, who originally had a base in Carrick-on-Suir but then a base in Boston. We have a lot of examples of companies with dual bases; it is all about internationalisation. In an event next week in New York, we have John Greally of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. John Greally is a geneticist and clinician, but also did some early work about the public genome effort in Ireland. He is a world leader in that space. Then we have the event organised in Washington.

What we are trying to do is tap into the network that we already know is there. I will give members a good example of that. There is a chap called Niall Lennon, who is one of the key people in the Broad Institute. I am not sure if members have heard of the Broad Institute - we would know about it from a science point of view. It did all of the Covid-19 testing for the entire state of Massachusetts - something like 35 million tests for Covid-19. Almost within a two-week period, it transitioned their lab. It is an amazing and world-leading facility. We have an Irish person in there who is essentially offering opportunities for training in the best technology institution worldwide. We just need a mechanism to facilitate that. We have things like Fulbright, etc., but sometimes we need more targeted mechanisms. We have people out there who are willing to help, but we just need mechanisms to facilitate those exchanges.