My Working Day: Prof Eoin Gaffney, consultant histopathologist at St James's Hospital in Dublin, is director of Biobank Ireland and is a strong advocate of research
I'm a consultant histopathologist and I'm also director and co-founder of Biobank Ireland, a charity to promote a network of linked "biobanks" in hospitals here to store cancer tissue samples for research.
What I do during the day is a mixture of the two. I get up at 5.30am and get a Dart into town, so I'm in St James's at about 7.30am.
We often have a team conference to discuss renal disease or cancer, then the rest of the day would be taken up examining biopsies or resection specimens and writing reports on them.
They are much more detailed nowadays, there's a lot of information that can be gained from the pathology and can be applied to prognosis. I do about 40-45 hours a week of pathology, and I teach and do research.
My research in the past 15 years has been around cancer and that was how I got interested in biobanking. I was trying to collect specimens down in the daycare centre and from theatre and I realised this was just impossible. So from that point on, around 2003, I realised we needed a proper structure.
Most biobanks are freezers, some are liquid nitrogen containers where you can store small frozen samples. We are talking about tiny bits of tissue that would otherwise be thrown out, which can now be used for scientifically and ethically approved research.
There are currently biobanks in hospitals but they are standalone. We would like to have one central biobank with very good procedures and quality assurance. And the idea of the network is to maximise our resources here, to share between the hospitals and with the North. The biobank is the bridge between patient care and research and back again.
Information technology is one hurdle. And consent is an important issue. Every patient who donates their tissue as a gift to the biobank must give full informed consent.
The idea is to start it in two hospitals and build it from the bottom up. Show that the procedures work, then as soon as the proof-of-concept is shown it should be brought into other hospitals in increments.
Some weeks I could spend three hours on biobank work, other weeks 20, often at night time. I also do a lot of figuring out and planning on the Dart.
A lot of it is about communicating by phone, e-mail, proposals, fundraising, meeting with stakeholders. I showed Mary Harney a diagram of the stakeholders and she blinked, asking how it was possible to talk to them all. I do find I have to try to make time for friends and family, because this is my life at the moment.
It can be difficult sometimes and it's like snakes and ladders. But there are so many people who think this is a good idea. It will transform research and patients will benefit.
I see people come into the hospital with a huge cancer burden. I say we have to get more awareness out there, get a system going initially to understand cancer, then screen and treat them and ultimately prevent it. We have to replace the fear of cancer with hope.
Eoin Gaffney will speak on Monday, December 3rd, at the public meeting Cancer Biobanking - The Vital Link to Better Treatment from 6pm, Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, 6 Kildare St, Dublin.
Register for the free event through pathology@rcpi.ie or by calling 01-8639700. See also www.biobankireland.com
In conversation with Claire O'Connell