Cancer Digest
Editor's Note
With the ongoing challenges and distance imposed by the recent pandemic, we thought that we needed a creative way to keep the public informed on our ongoing efforts to fight cancer.
This platform invites the public to witness life behind the scenes in the Patrick G Johnston Centre for Cancer Research (PGJCCR). The Centre houses scientific experts in many and distinct disciplines, from cancer cell biology, to pathology, epidemiology, genomics and physics, and also students with a passion for a topic, research itself or the mission it aims to accomplish.
Our individual skills converge towards our duty as a Research Centre and an educational facility, where we train cancer researchers of the future.
In the pages within Cancer Digest, you will find updates and specific topics, communicating what our experts and clinicians identify as the most urgent questions in cancer research, and how our combined effort is contributing to better clinical practice and patient outcomes.
Here you will find information on treatments, cancer types, specific research questions. You will meet some of our researchers working on each of those problems, what are the challenges we face and the successes we’ve achieved in our fight against cancer in many areas that need attention, from the basic understanding of the disease, to its prevention, better diagnosis, treatment and quality of life.
We will also include concerns and hopes of patients, families, as well as doctors and nurses. We rely on our research partners and the public and our own clinicians. This section will also rely on our partnership and with the Northern Ireland Cancer Research Consumer Forum (NICRCF), headed by the newly appointed chair, Aidan McCormick, who will help guide the topics, frame patients questions and interests, and act as co-editor in this section. Here we will welcome and integrate the thoughts of the wider community impacted by cancer.
Meet Aidan
They convert ideas to results, and can create bridges between their projects and the outcome of patients with cancer. Some will come with a passion for research itself, others chasing a personal story, or intrigued by an inspiring mentor. All of them find themselves, through immense dedication, making ground-breaking contributions to better cancer outcomes, one experiment at a time. Here they tell us first-hand how they found their way to where they are, what are the skills they found essential to complete such a challenge, what their life and a cancer researcher in training looks like, and how they see their work impacting the community. We asked them to tell us, in one word, what it takes to succeed in that endeavour, and you will see on the right, the kind of future cancer scientists we have the privilege to mentor!
Find training days, lectures, fundraising events, newsworthy discoveries and where you can find the PGJCCR in all of the above.
You can hear our experts, patients and students discuss each of the topics we work on.
Editor: Cristina Branco
Co-editors: Ruth Boyd, Donna-Maria Rogers
Contributors: Kiera McGill, Cathy Corbett