€3.1m investment in cancer research announced

The Irish Cancer Society has announced a €3.1m investment in cancer research through the awarding of 16 research grants.

A total of eight Irish Cancer Society Research Scholars, four Research Fellows and four prostate cancer researchers received the grants, which will ensure new research projects are commenced in breast, colorectal, ovarian, leukaemia, oesophageal, lung, prostate and metastatic cancers.

“We are so proud to be announcing our next round of cancer researchers who we will now be supporting,” said Irish Cancer Society CEO John McCormack.

“The standard of research proposals was exceptionally high and after a rigorous review process conducted by our international expert panel, we are confident that the research that we are funding will contribute towards making significant advances in cancer research at national and international level”

The 16 research awards span a wide range of areas that will investigate a number of potentially important discoveries

Award recipient Joanne Stanicka, who is working on a leukaemia research project at UCC, said she believed that by doing research on cancer she could use her “knowledge and enthusiasm for science to help these or next generations to find promising treatments that could find a cure to control the growth of cancer cells.”

Cancer is a major cause of death and disease in this country and each year there are over 30,000 new cases of cancer diagnosed as well as over 8,700 deaths.

Cancer rates are expected to rise and it is estimated that by 2020, 40,000 new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in Ireland each year.