2025 Pilgrims

PILGRIMS 2025

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INTRODUCTION Dear Medical Pilgrims and Partners, on behalf of the Provost and Fellows of the Holy Undivided Trinity, Near Dublin, I am delighted to welcome you to our central Dublin Campus for you annual meeting.

The original purpose of the Medical Pilgrims was to visit centres of medical excellence and get to know leading continental physicians. Eight of the first ten Pilgrimages were to centres outside Great Britain and Ireland, seven to Continental Europe and one to America. Only three of the ten post war Pilgrimages were to Europe. However, although the pre-war pattern was temporarily re-established in the late 50s and 60s, the subsequent three decades saw 25 of 30 Pilgrimages within the UK and Ireland. From 2000, a more eclectic approach of earlier Pilgrimages has become established with an informal commitment to one in three Pilgrimages being undertaken outside the UK. Their inaugural meeting, arranged by Dr Arthur Hurst of Guy’s Hospital, took place in Paris in 1928. He also kept an account of this pilgrimage and so set the pattern for all subsequent meetings of the club. This collection of pilgrimages remembered is a compilation of lightly edited reports of the Medical Pilgrims’ annual junkets from 1928 to 1996 to centres of medical excellence at home and abroad. Each visit had its own scribe, and this accounts for the variety of styles and standards of these reports.

This year we are delighted to host the Medical Pilgrims meeting at Trinity College In Dublin. This is only the 6th Visit of the Pilgrims to Ireland and only the third to Dublin and as far as I can tell the first to TCD. - Colin P Doherty MD FRCPI Professor of Epileptology and Head of School of Medicine

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PROGRAMME OF EVENTS THURSDAY 8th MAY Arrive in Dublin Booked accomodation for 30-35 pilgrims and partners in the Davenport Hotel 6:15 pm AGM and Guest Speaker (Prof Owen Smith, Title: Denis Parsons Burkitt (1911-1993): Irish by Birth, Trinity by the Grace of God a Life Celebrated in Old Anatomy Theatre 8:00 pm Dinner at the Davenport Hotel FRIDAY 9th MAY Scientific programme (see page 4). Robert Emmet theatre, main Campus 9:15 . Speakers from TCD (see page 5-12).

There will also be a social programme that day for partners which will involve medical history tour of Dublin and TCD (Prof Harbison) and visit to Book of Kells experience.

7:30 pm Dinner in the Royal Dublin Yacht Club, Dún Laoghaire SATURDAY 10th MAY 10:00 am General interest for pilgrims and partners 1. Prof Dermot Kelleher “What is a Bicycle, What is Life?”

The Strange Intersection of Erwin Schrödinger and Flann O’Brien 2. Prof Joe Harbison ‘Kings, Queens, GIants, Mummies, and Saint Molua’ 7:30 pm Formal dinner for pilgrims, partners and speakers from Friday in the Kildare Club. (After dinner speaker Prof Muiris Fitzgerald) SUNDAY 11th MAY

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SCIENTIFIC PROGRAMME SYMPOSIUM FRIDAY 9th ROBERT EMMET THEATRE, MAIN CAMPUS ARTS BLOCK 9:00 - 9:15 am

Chris Conlon / Colin Doherty MD - Welcome Address

Early Morning Session - Chair Chris Conlon 9:15 - 9:45 am

Joe Keane - Everything is Tuberculosis

9:50 - 10:20 am

Iracema Leroi - Breaking Down Borders for Brain Health

10:25 - 10:55 am

Aiden Corvin - The Enigma of the Mind: Where Psychiatry and Genomics Meet

11:00 - 11:30 am

Colin Doherty - Concussion: Science and

11:35 - 11:50 am

Policy Coffee

Late Morning Session - Chair Colin Doherty 11:50 - 12:20 pm

Seamus Donnelly - Lung cancer is a Word Not a Sentence

12:25 - 13:00 pm

Garret FitzGerald - The Aging Chronobiome

13:00 - 13:45 pm

Lunch

Early Afternoon Session - Cancer 13:45 - 14:15 pm

Gerry Hanna - The Evolution of Radiotherapy - Improved Precision in Targeting Cancer

14:20 - 14:50 pm

Emily Harold - Lynch Syndrome: Novel Insights

14:55 - 15:25 pm

Jessie Elliott - Living Beyond Cancer

Late Afternoon Session - Public Health / Aging - Chair Seamus Donnelly 15:30 - 16:00 pm

Susan Smith - Treating People not Diseases

16:05 - 16:35 pm

Rose Anne Kenny - Health Span vs Life Span - Lessons from a Longitudinal Study

16:40 - 17:10 pm Depart 17:15 - 17:30 pm

Cliona Ni Cheallaig - Have We Moved on from the Workhouse?

Colin Doherty - Concluding Remarks

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MEET THE SPEAKERS Professor Owen Smith is Professor of Child, Adolescent & Young Adult Oncology and Professor of Haematology in the School of Medicine, Trinity College Dublin. he is Consultant Paediatric Haematologist at Children’s Health Ireland at Crumlin, National Clinical Lead for Child, Adolescent & Young Adult cancers at the National Cancer Control Programme and is currently Chair of the Adolescent & Young Adult Cancer Committee of the European Society for Paediatric Oncology.

The co-author of more than 450 research original articles, letters, books, book chapters and papers, Professor Smith is a Fellow of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, Royal College of Pathologists, Royal College of Physicians of Dublin, Royal College of Physicians London, Royal College of Physicians Glasgow, and Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh. He is an international advocate for children and adolescents with rare diseases and for expanded access to expensive drugs. He was admitted to honorary fellowship of Trinity College Dublin (the oldest and most valued tradition of the University) in 2009 and was appointed Regius Professor of Physic (1637), the oldest of Trinity’s Chairs in the School of Medicine in June 2014. The following year he was conferred Honorary CBE for his life-long work on cancer in children and adolescents by Queen Elizabeth.

Professor Joseph Keane holds the 1955 Chair of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin and he works at the Saint James’s Hospital National Centre for Tuberculosis. His research contributions to the field of ‘infection and host defence’ include the seminal report of the association of tuberculosis with biological treatments. His group performs cellular immunology and translational research, and his scholarly work has been recognized by his election to the Royal Irish Academy.

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Professor Iracema Leroi is Professor in Geriatric Psychiatry, holding positions at Trinity College Dublin and the Global Brain Health Institute (www.gbhi.org). She also serves as a consultant geriatric psychiatrist at St. James’ Hospital, Dublin. Trained in Canada and the United States, including in the neuropsychiatry program at Johns Hopkins University, she previously held the role of Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Manchester. During her tenure there, she founded and led the Greater Manchester Dementia Clinical Trials Programme. Currently, Professor Leroi leads the HRB-CTN Dementia Trials Ireland network and oversees a portfolio of drug and non-drug clinical trials for dementia at St. James’ Hospital.

Her research focus centres on the mental health aspects of Lewy body diseases, exemplified by her leadership of the 4-year HRB-funded EMERALD Lewy program. This initiative aims to enhance the diagnosis and care of individuals with Lewy body dementia. Professor Leroi was also the Chief Investigator of the EU-wide Horizon 2020 SENSE-Cog program (www.sense-cog. eu), which involved eight nations and 37 investigators. SENSE-Cog explored the intricate links between age-related hearing, vision, and cognitive impairments, assessing the impact of sensory interventions on dementia outcomes. In her new role as Director of the Global Brain Health Institute at Trinity College Dublin, Professor Leroi is deeply committed to promoting equitable access to brain health care. She is an advocate for ensuring that the voices of individuals living with dementia are integral to research, policy development, and service design.

Professor Garret FitzGerald is the McNeil Professor in Translational Medicine and Therapeutics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he directs the Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics.

Previously, he chaired the Department of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics. His work contributed fundamentally to the development of low-dose aspirin for cardio protection. FitzGerald’s group was the first to predict and then mechanistically explain the cardiovascular hazard from other NSAIDs. He has discovered many products of lipid peroxidation and established their utility as indices of oxidant stress in vivo. His laboratory was the first to discover a molecular clock in the cardiovascular system to describe bi-directional regulation of peripheral clocks with the master clock in the suprachiasmatic nucleus.

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Professor Joe Harbison is a Consultant Geriatrician and Stroke Physician in St James’s Hospital Dublin. He studied medicine in University College Dublin and after Membership undertook his MD and Higher Specialist Training in the North East of England. He spent time working a Consultant in Gateshead before being appointed as Senior Lecturer and Consultant in York. He returned to Dublin in 2006 and is an Associate Professor in Medical Gerontology in Trinity and clinical lead of the Stroke Service in St James’s.

He was previously National Clinical Lead for Stroke and is current Clinical Lead for the Irish National Audit of Stroke. He is Deputy Head of School having previously spent 5 years as Director of Undergraduate Teaching and Learning. Joe is proud of his lack of focus and has published in topics as varied as Mathematics, Psychology, Education and particularly on History. He is the School’s unofficial history nerd. He coordinates the undergraduate module in Medical History, and leads a walking tour of the History of Disease and Medicine in Dublin. When he was appointed Fellow in the College it was on the basis of publications in both Medicine and History. He has recently been honoured as a Licenciate of Apothecary’s Hall and can therefore call himself ‘Apothecary and Physician’. He now somewhat regrets all the jokes he made about Apothecaries in previous lectures and walking tours but not enough to stop telling them.

Dr Emily Harrold is currently a medical oncology consultant at the Trinity St James Cancer Institute at St James’s Hospital in Dublin where she holds both a clinical and genetic appointment. She is co-director of the Young Onset Cancer Center. She previously completed an advanced oncology fellowship in Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre in New York where her research focused on genetic predisposition syndromes and the impact of novel therapeutics on mitigating cancer risk. Her career to date has been distinguished by both Irish and international awards including ISMO Bursary awards, the Paddy Johnston Colorectal Cancer Research Award and most recently ASCO Special Merit Awards at the annual ASCO meetings in 2022 and in 2023 for her research evaluating the risk of neoplasia in patients with Lynch syndrome post immunotherapy treatment and somatic-germline integration to evaluate the contribution of non-classical germline pathogenic variants to colorectal carcinogenesis. She was awarded an American Society of Oncology Conquer Cancer Young investigator Grant to fund her ongoing study, in collaboration with the BROAD institute, in 08

patients with Lynch syndrome treated with immunotherapy.

Professor Aiden Corvin is professor of Psychiatry at TCD. research is informed by an imperative as a psychiatrist to improve patient care. He and his team have progressed understanding of the genetics of psychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, identifying hundreds of genetic risk variants, albeit with small individual effects on risk. Separately with Broad Institute/MIT colleagues, Prof Corvin headed the Brainstorm Consortium, examining a wider vista to map out the molecular aetiology of psychiatric and neurological disorders. His focus has moved to applying whole genome sequencing (WGS) methods to identify highly penetrant mutations, rare in the population, but potentially most informative for understanding disease biology. This involves two work streams. First, a WGS study of schizophrenia in the Irish population with researchers in the US and Iceland. Second, through his role as a lead investigator with the international Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) and chair of their Pedigree Analysis Working Group. Here he have developed new analytical methods which he will use to investigate families densely affected with psychiatric disorders from around the world. Funders have included Wellcome, the National Institute of Health (US), Research Ireland and the Irish Health Research Board. >350 research publications can be found at (https://www.tcd.ie/research/profiles/?profile=acorvin) and have received >75,000 citations.

Professor Clíona Ní Cheallaigh is an Associate Professor in the Department of Clinical Medicine, TCD and a Consultant in Infectious Diseases and General Medicine in St James’s Hospital, Dublin. She is the Clinical Lead of the Inclusion Health Service in St James’s Hospital dedicated to improving access to specialist hospital care for socially excluded individuals. The service started in 2016 and now consists of a full interdisciplinary team providing care to inpatients and outpatients. Her research seeks to look at the effect of social exclusion on health from a number of perspectives. Current projects include a study using translational simulation to support hospital staff in providing psychological trauma-informed care, a HRB-funded Secondary Data Analysis Project working on integrating health datasets with datasets identifying experiences of social exclusion, and studies on the effect of psychosocial stress on the the brain and the immune system. She is also part of the SFI-funded COVID-19 Research Hub in TCD, with a particular interest in looking at why people who are marginalized are more likely to get severe COVID-19. She has a strong interest in ensuring equity of outcomes for socially excluded people living with HIV.

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Professor Seamas Donnelly is Professor of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin and Respiratory Consultant at Tallaght University Hospital. A cell and molecular biologist he completed his research training with Chris Haslett and John Savill at Edinburgh and with Rick Bucala at Rockefeller University prior to returning to Ireland. He is a recent past President of the Association of Physicians of Great Britain & Ireland (AoP), the UK’s leading medical academic organisation in the Translational Medicine space. He was recently awarded an honorary Fellowship by the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI). In addition, he has recently been awarded an Honorary Professorship by the University of Edinburgh for international leadership in Translational Medicine. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Quarterly Journal of Medicine (QJM) (Impact Factor: 10.7 (2024)).

Professor Muiris X Fitzgerald is a 1964 graduate of UCD, he trained in Dublin, the Seton Hall Medical School Jersey City NJ, the University of Birmingham UK and as an International Fogarty – NIH Fellow at Boston University Medical School Thoracic Services under the aegis of Ed Gaensler, Gordon Snider and Charles Carrington. During his training in Boston he published numerous papers on Environmental and Occupational lung disease, Surgery for Bullous Lung Disease, the Evaluation of Electronic Spirometers, the effects of Marijuana on the Lung, the Natural History and Treated Course of UIP and DIP –the latter three papers were published in the New England Journal of Medicine. On returning to St Vincent’s Hospital Dublin he established its first Pulmonary Function Laboratory and initiated the first Adult and Adolescent CF service in Ireland, as well as a suite of specialist outpatient clinics for patients with sarcoidosis, lung fibrosis/rare lung diseases and asthma.

He served as Secretary of the ITTS and as first Secretary of the newly formed Irish Thoracic Society in 1980, later becoming its third President. He was Chairman/ President of the Cystic Fibrosis Association of Ireland and of the Irish Asthma Society. Prof FitzGerald is Emeritus Professor of Medicine and Therapeutics at University College Dublin, where he was Professor of Medicine and Consultant Physician (St Vincent’s University Hospital) from 1977 to 2006 and then Dean of the Faculty of Medicine from 2000 to 2006. He is a former two-term Chairman of the Health Research Board (HRB) and served on the foundation Board of the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA), the Irish Society of Chartered Physiotherapists, An Bord Altranais and Comhairle na nOispideal for four terms.

In professional education, he served as Chair of the Education Committee of the Irish Medical Council for four years and was Chair of the Medical Education, 10

Training and Research Committee (METR) of the HSE from 2006 to 2009).

Professor Rose Anne Kenny is the Regius Professor of Physic (2022) at Trinity College, Chair of Medical Gerontology and a consultant physician St James Hospital, Dublin (2006) where she is founding director of a new purpose built clinical research institute for ageing (Mercers Institute Successful Ageing, MISA; (2006). Formerly Professor of Cardiovascular Research and head of the department of Geriatric Medicine at Newcastle University (1990- 2005) after completing clinical and research training at the Hammersmith and Westminster hospitals, London. She is founding director of The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) established in 2006 which continues to collate multifaceted subjective and objective information of the experience of ageing and was recently assigned as the WHO Collaborating Centre for Longitudinal Studies on Ageing and the Life Course (2024).

Professor Susan Smith is Professor of General Practice at Trinity College Dublin and works as a General Practitioner at Inchicore Family Doctors in Dublin 8, Ireland.

Her research interests include improving outcomes for patients living with multiple long term conditions (multimorbidity) and related clinical issues such as health equity and medicines management. She is the Associate Director of the HRB Primary Care Clinical Trials Network Ireland and has been the PI or Co-PI on eight RCTs of interventions for chronic disease management in Irish primary care settings and has just commenced a national three arm cluster RCT evaluating two interventions, GP based pharmacists and link workers providing social prescribing, for people with multimorbidity taking ten or more medicines. She is Clinical Lead for the HRB Evidence Synthesis for Clinical Guidelines programme, which supports production of Ireland’s Clinical Guidelines.

She is Head of Discipline for Public Health and Primary Care in the School of Medicine in Trinity College Dublin. She also coordinates the Deep End Ireland Group, which advocates for needs-based resource allocation for primary care services for socioeconomically disadvantaged groups.

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Professor Dermot Kelleher joined the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 2015 and serves as the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Vice-President, Health. Prior to his appointment at UBC, Dr. Kelleher served as Vice-President Health and Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College London, where he also held a concurrent appointment as Dean of the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine in Singapore until 2014. Dr. Kelleher has also served as Head of the School of Medicine and Vice Provost for Medical Affairs at Trinity College, Dublin. Dr. Kelleher graduated from medicine from Trinity College, Dublin in 1978, going on to specialize in gastroenterology and general internal medicine. Author of 300 publications and 14 patents, Dr. Kelleher’s research examines immune responses in gastrointestinal disease and cancer. Over the years he has received many prestigious awards including a NIH Fogarty Scholarship at the University of California San Diego, Wellcome Senior Fellowship in Clinical Science, and the Conway Medal from the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland. In addition, he has served as a non-executive Director of ICON plc, a globally leading Clinical Research Organization. A Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (London), he also served as President of the Federation of European Academies of Medicine before moving to British Columbia, Canada.

Professor Colin Doherty holds the Ellen Mayston Bates Chair in Epileptology at Trinity College Dublin is Head of School in Trinity College School of Medicine. He graduated from UCD in 1991. He enrolled in the Harvard Neurology Training Programme in Boston in 1998 was appointed Chief Resident there in 2001. He completed Fellowships in Epilepsy and Cognition at Massachusetts General Hospital (2001-2003). He returned to Ireland in 2003 and joined the Neurology Division at St James’s Hospital, He joined the staff of TCD as Professor of Epileptology in 2020. He was elected as Head of School of Medicine at TCD in September 2022. Colin has published in the areas of brain imaging in epilepsy, dementia, and traumatic brain injury. In the last decade, he has become interested in the challenges of population health, health services research, medical education, and the socio-technical challenges of digital health. Colin was the National Clinical Lead for Epilepsy from 2010-18. He is PI in the Digital Health pillar in the Research Ireland funded Research Centre, FutureNeuro (www.futureneuro.ie).

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Professor Gerry Hanna is the Marie Curie Chair of Clinical Oncology at Trinity College Dublin and a Consultant in Radiation Oncology at the St Lukes Radiation Oncology Network within the Trinity St James Cancer Institute. Gerry also holds honorary appointments at the University of Melbourne, and Queen’s University Belfast. His Research interests include the use of PET/CT in radiotherapy planning for lung cancer, mechanisms of radiotherapy resistance, stereotactic ablative radiotherapy and systemic therapy and immunotherapy combinations with radiotherapy. Prof Hanna is the Vice-Clinical Lead of Cancer Trials Ireland, Chief Investigator of the Peter Mac ACRF Radiation Immuno-oncology Program and the International Atomic Energy Agency’s “PERTAIN” study. He is the former chief investigator and current TMG member of the CRUK funded CONCORDE study. Gerry is also a TMG member for the UK’s HALT, SARON, CONFIRM and ISOTOXIC IMRT studies and continues to provide research support to Belfast Trust.

Professor Jessie Elliott is a consultant minimally invasive and robotic upper gastrointestinal cancer surgeon and principal investigator at the Trinity St. James’s Cancer Institute. Having studied at Trinity College Dublin and completed a PhD in translational medicine, she spent time in the Netherlands and South Korea, before returning to Ireland. She has led the development of a clinical and translational research programme in oesophageal and gastric cancer survivorship at the Trinity St James’s Cancer Institute funded by the Health Research Board and the Irish Cancer Society. Current projects include the international multicentre SARONG-II RCT in upper gastrointestinal cancer surveillance and the IMPROVE study investigating the application of liquid biopsy in oesophagogastric cancer. She is an ICAT programme supervisor and has received several awards for her work including the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and American College of Surgeons International Scholarship and an American Society of Clinical Oncology Conquer Cancer Award. She his Co-Chair of the UK and Ireland Oesophagogastric Cancer Research Group, Editor of Diseases of the Esophagus journal and executive committee member within the International Society for Diseases of the Oesophagus.

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