CIARAN FLANAGAN
Ciaran Flanagan is MD of 3 companies: IDEA, a branding and advertising company, MEDIA, an advertising media and planning company, and The Financial Information Company, a publication firm. He is Chairman of the Graphic Design Business Association and was Chairman of Design Week 2006. He has co-ordinated fundraising for two charities previously.
He first had the idea of obtaining business support to raise the profile of Irish medical research while Professor Eoin Gaffney was a client of his design company. They have promoted the Biobank Network concept since 2003.
EOIN GAFFNEY
Eoin Gaffney is a histopathologist at St James’s Hospital and Associate Professor of Histopathology at Trinity College, Dublin. Most of his 90 publications are on unusual cancers and apoptosis (genetically mediated cell death) in cancer. Because of his proteomics collaboration with Dr Lance Liotta, he has been a frequent visiting scientist to the National Cancer Institute in Washington since 2000, and recognised the need for a biobanking infrastructure in Ireland. He founded the St James’s Hospital Cancer Strategy Group, and the Dublin Soft Tissue Tumour Panel, and he has contributed to Ireland’s national cancer strategy.
His concept of an all-Ireland Biobank Network, to link and magnify the resources of Irish hospitals, north and south, within the NCI-Ireland Cancer Consortium, was inspired by Dr Manuel Morente, director of the Spanish Tumour Bank.
Eoin Gaffney has presented at, or organised several Irish biobanking meetings and was was local organiser for The European Society of Haematology’s first Euroconference on Biobanking in Dublin in January, 2005. He presented the Irish biobank network concept in Seattle at the 2005 meeting of the International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories. He was an invited participant at the November 2005 National Cancer Institute Symposium on International Harmonisation of Biorepository Practices. He is a member of the Marble Arch Working Group on International Biobanking