A committee at Dublin's Mater Hospital meets today to discuss the controversial deferment of a cancer treatment trial.
The clinical trials advisory group will reconsider its decision to delay the trial of lung cancer treatment Tarceva on religious grounds.
The committee, chaired by the hospital's chief executive Brian Conlan, decided at the end of September that the wording of an information leaflet for patients involved in the trials was counter to the hospital's Catholic ethos.
The leaflet said female participants would have to agree to use birth control since the drug could affect an unborn child. The leaflet also advises that abstinence would be a suitable alternative but the hospital was still concerned that advice to use contraception was contrary to its ethos.
Roche Ireland, the company behind Tarceva, said last week that the committee "did not examine the full documentation supplied".
An leaflet with an alternative wording is to be presented to the committee at today's meeting, and it could be sufficient for the trial to resume. The trial involves a small number of patients and is already under way at hospitals in Cork, Galway and Tallaght, and at Beaumont and St James's hospitals.
The Mater was the focus of more unwelcome publicity today when it emerged a heart patient was forced to wait for treatment in a storeroom.
Labour TD Joe Costello said the man, who had collapsed at home, was put in the storeroom because there was no room in the emergency ward.
He was told he was 35th in line for treatment and would have to wait on the chair for three or four days but chose to check himself out, Mr Costello said. "This is the sad and sorry state of our emergency medicine," the TD said.