Question: My question is for sinead . How does it feel to know that you can cure such a terrible disease that effects many people worldwide each day ?

Sinead Loughran answered on 14 Nov 2016:

This is a nice question.

It is a very great privilege to work in cancer research. I am a farmer’s daughter from rural Ireland, growing up I never imagined I would get the chance to do the work I do never mind go to university.

I feel very blessed to have been able to do my PhD in cancer research which was funded by the Irish Cancer Society and the Health Research Board through funding that my PhD supervisor Dr Dermot Walls (DCU) worked really hard to get.

As part of my PhD studies I travelled to the University of Birmingham to do some work on patient tumours. I think this was a very important moment for me in my research as I felt directly connected to the patients from whom these tumours had been removed. It was hard to think that perhaps some of those patients did not have a good outcome but it reinforced the importance of what I was doing for the cancer patients of the future.