Dr. Paul Kelly

And often those trials, like you say, are backed or funded or at least part funded by the pharmaceutical industry.

But in my own specialty of radiotherapy,

There is no pharma company.

And actually, it can be quite difficult to attract funding to run clinical trials.

And in Ireland, we're lucky that we have a network of clinical trials for oncology called Cancer Trials Ireland, who are helping...

to design and deliver this trial for us.

And in this particular trial, there is some philanthropic funding, but also the trial is being backed by one of the gel spacer companies that reduce the rectal side effects.

Yeah, so essentially the trials are how we move the dial to the next standard of care.

And that is a really important message because without clinical trials, really things, you know, stand still.

And it's only by patient's

agreeing to go into clinical trials and also, you know, health systems actually running clinical trials that we can answer these questions.

And that's how the whole process moves along and that treatments improve.

And actually, this trial is also not unique, but it has patient involvement right from the get go in this study.

And patients in Ireland have been involved in helping us design this clinical trial.

And this is really important because I suppose historically, more paternalistically, often doctors were deciding, OK, we'll run this trial because I think this is a good question.

But increasingly now, patients are involved in the research and actually helping to design and deliver the clinical trials themselves.

And you can see this trial is all about focus on quality of life, because thankfully, more and more men with localised prostate cancer survive and are cured of their cancer.

But they may well be living with the side effect of that treatment.

So minimizing those things for the long term can have a really big impact on their life and how they live in that survivorship period after their cancer treatment.

Yeah, I think that's a very important message.