Health committee  On reference-based pricing, first we need to understand how weird the market is for pharmaceuticals. You can imagine this market as a dinner for three, basically. You go for dinner, and there's one guy ordering the meal, the physician. He's prescribing the product, but does not p

Health committee  Absolutely. New Zealand has other ways as well, but reference pricing is really the central way to do that. That's because what you're doing here is a very clever way to use market forces, market competition, in order to lower the price of drugs. You still respect patents. If t

Health committee  Well, there is no reason why this drug should not be competing with the other already existing drugs. If you don't put any market competition in place, if you basically agree to pay for any drug that does not represent a therapeutic advantage and pay the full price for that, th

Health committee  If you look at the funding for R and D in the health field, not just pharmaceutical health field in general and you take into account tax credits, basically business expenditures in R and D represent only 19% of the total spending. I'd really like to finish with this last slide.

Health committee  Fantastic. That is all I need. We have an innovation system that is broken, but we still have the possibility of transforming the financial incentives for innovation. Instead of just plowing more money in the current system, we need to rethink the way we use that public money ri

Health committee  Yes, and I think it was distributed to everyone.

Health committee  Thank you very much. With respect to my presentation, I'd just like to warn you that I found out I'd been invited to appear before the committee just last week. I had to submit my slides for translation the next day, so I've recycled a presentation I gave last month to McGill Un

Industry committee  Private research is highly based on coming up with selling points for pharmaceutical products rather than on clinical research that makes it possible to fully understand the safety of those products. When data secrecy is imposed, and the data are produced by companies and then pu

Industry committee  In my view, having patent policies does not mean more innovation. We currently have an institutionalized corporate welfare system. So what I am trying to show is that patent policies are not necessarily the best tool to improve therapeutic innovation. In terms of policies, we c

Industry committee  In terms of data protection, we fully comply with the TRIPS agreement. Extending data protection seeks to encourage companies to do research and clinical trials on already existing drugs to see whether or not they could be used for other purposes. I personally think that it wou

Industry committee  I think it would be only too logical to check lowering prices against comparable countries, and that would have no impact on research and development funding. For example, in terms of the money we could save, we have to understand how the whole current innovation system works in

Industry committee  It is possible that, if we agree to the European Union's requests, we will simply end up increasing costs without actually generating more innovation in the sector. If we compare ourselves to Europe, we need to understand that patents give you a protection period. What is being

Industry committee  Thank you.

Industry committee  In the pharmaceutical sector, and even in other sectors, players are constantly in conflict. That is why the idea of integrating a culture of collaboration is no easy feat. However, when we talk to researchers from companies, we see that they are on board to try to increase colla

Industry committee  I have collaborated with Richard Gold, who came to make a presentation here, I believe. We work a great deal on patent pooling for various diseases, among other things. It is one of the nice ways to encourage researchers to collaborate and to make interesting discoveries. We hav