I have funding from CIHR and I've also had funding from Brain Canada. I do work on Alzheimer's disease, and I've had major findings in the field. Our approach is quite different from CIHR's in that we don't target a particular disease. We have chosen not to target. If we're targeting, we want to target underlying causes of multiple neurological diseases.
For example, in ALS, nerve cells die, and in Alzheimer's, nerve cells die. So what we want to do is encourage teams to come forward with the best ideas to ask how we can keep all nerve cells from dying in multiple conditions. We believe that a drug or therapy that will then address one particular condition will address multiple conditions. This complements both what CIHR is doing and the individual NHCC members are doing in targeting conditions, because our goal really is to bring the research community together—the different disciplines and the different disease groups—to ask what the underlying problem really is and whether we can approach it. It's a complementary approach. Both are needed—CIHR's and NHCC individual member's, as well as ours.