Industry committee  Honourable members of Parliament, I am very grateful to you for the opportunity to appear before you today to talk about Canada's science and technology policy in the context of health research. I appreciate the opportunity to present to the members of this committee on how CIH

Industry committee  Sure. Composed of 13 virtual institutes headed by leading Canadian researchers in their respective disciplines, CIHR provides leadership and support to more than 11,000 health researchers and trainees across Canada. CIHR was designed to address research challenges across the sp

Industry committee  Okay. We are fully endorsing the setting of priorities in health research in order to be accountable to Canadians. In conclusion, translation of health research into health, social, and economic benefits in collaboration with academic, public, and private sector partners is cri

Industry committee  We can look at it in two ways. In terms of the applications we receive, the ones that are funded represent about 20% to 25%, depending on the competition. But the ones that pass what we call the funding level--that is, they are fundable applications--represent about one third.

Industry committee  Exactly.

Industry committee  Currently in the U.S. the success rate is very low. It has been extremely low over the last few years. I can give you the number of successful applications in terms of the overall applications. It would vary, but it is somewhere between 10% to 15%, depending on the panels. I ca

Industry committee  To start, I think the funding agencies can provide support mainly at the discovery stage, and also at the proof of principle stage. Beyond that, it would take much more investment and resources to be able to go--

Industry committee  Yes. The three councils, and I include the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, are making great efforts to put in place programs to encourage the development of careers for women in science, in research and in human sciences. The issue is not necessarily about support at the be

Industry committee  The programs that Canada has put in place in recent years make us competitive. Before I joined CIHR, I had the privilege of setting up a new research institute at the Université de Montréal. Because of programs established quite recently, we were able to attract a number of team

Industry committee  I would add a comment to that. Certainly very important in health research and the other areas too is that we need to be in line with...because knowledge translation involves the application of the results. In health that is largely dependent on the provinces, so we really need

Industry committee  SARS is another example. We needed to have the preparedness, but we couldn't predict in advance that we'd have the problem.

Industry committee  I think it is very important to foster the interest at the secondary level and even before that. We have a program called Synapse. It's a mentoring program; the researchers in particular are very keen in doing that part of the mentoring. I think we need to tap into these people

Industry committee  In the area of health, I would say that there are clear economic benefits. Think of the development of biotechnology and the pharmaceutical industry in Canada. Those are what I would categorize as classic economic impacts. In commercialization, the health sector is very active.

Industry committee  Actually, the returns linked to intellectual property go to the institutions. The universities, which for the most part are public institutions, are the ones who benefit from the discoveries or the research.

Industry committee  As Dr. Gaffield mentioned, for us, the process goes in a cycle. Researchers are encouraged to make discoveries and the institutes seek to protect the intellectual property associated with those discoveries. Any benefits from that will have economic effects on the population that