The UCD Cancer Trials Cluster has published The Living Stories of Cancer Research, a short book about five people who work in, fund, or take part in cancer research in Ireland. 

Cancer research is often described in terms of labs, trials, funding, and outcomes. This book introduces five of those people: a patient advocate, a research nurse, a consultant haematologist, a research funder, and a professor of cancer biology. 

The idea for the book came from an event held at the Museum of Literature Ireland in October 2025. The event invited members of the public to sit down and talk with people from across the cancer research community. 

It was hosted by the St Vincent’s UCD Cancer Centre through one of its flagship programmes, the UCD Cancer Trials Cluster, and in collaboration with UCD PPI Ignite Network, The Patient Voice in Cancer Research, and the Irish Cancer Society.  

The five stories

Mary Staunton works in events and communications at UCD. Her leukaemia diagnosis came out of nowhere: no family history, and she’d never been seriously ill. She’s in no doubt that a stem cell transplant, made possible by research done decades earlier, is the reason she’s still here. Today she volunteers with the Patient Voice in Cancer Research, helps PhD students explain their work in plain English, and keeps asking why some cancers, leukaemia included, get less research attention than others.

Muireann McDonnell started out as a nurse on a children’s cardiac ward before switching to research nursing. She worked on EU Navigate, a study looking at whether structured support helps older adults with cancer, and the people caring for them, find their way through the health system. A lot of that meant visiting people at home, and one of her favourite moments was hearing a participant describe how she’d gone from struggling to get out the door to planning a holiday.

Dr Anne Fortune is a Consultant Haematologist at the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital. When she was training, chronic myeloid leukaemia usually meant a bone marrow transplant. Within a few years, it could be managed with a tablet a day. She later set up a haematology service in Cavan from scratch, so patients no longer had to travel to Dublin for every appointment, and helped build the haematology trials service at the Mater.

Dr Claire Kilty spent eight years researching inherited blindness without ever meeting anyone who had it. Now Head of Research at the Irish Cancer Society, she runs a funding process where 40 patient partners have an equal say with international scientists on which projects get funded.

Professor William Gallagher is Professor of Cancer Biology at UCD. As an undergraduate, he was one of the first to use PCR on breast cancer samples. Early in his career, a grant reviewer told him he’d never achieve anything in cancer research. He’s since become a strong voice for patient involvement and for getting cancer researchers across the island of Ireland working together.

The common thread across all five is patient involvement, whether that’s patients helping decide what gets funded or advocates asking researchers awkward questions.

Read the book

You can download a free copy of The Living Stories of Cancer Research here.

The UCD Cancer Trials Cluster is a collaboration between the St Vincent’s UCD Cancer Centre, the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital, UCD, and the Health Research Board.