Health committee  I really don't have any idea what--

Health committee  The bone marrow transplant procedure that's being used by Harry Atkins, the hematologist, as part of that trial, does involve a mild blade of therapy, which is chemo. The hope is that by using drugs that modulate the immune system they can move forward and not do that in the futu

Health committee  A big challenge is jurisdictional, between the federal government and the provinces. The CBS program is well worked out. They have a mature business plan. They have the resources, and they can implement this. They can have quality cords available that represent the diversity of C

Health committee  Without question, federal funding of research, through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, has not kept pace with the capacity that's been added or with inflation. The proportion of grants that have been funded is in free fall. The times are very tight right now. So Can

Health committee  The funding is very tight right now. New investigators are having a hard time getting funding. Established investigators are losing their funding. On the proportion of grants, I think the last CIHR competition...that was funded was 18%, and it's expected to become even smaller.

Health committee  There exist in every tissue resident stem cells. There are probably over 300 different cell types in our bodies. I think the exact number of stem cells is unclear. There's a large number of different types of stem cells.

Health committee  Well, there are also brain stem cells that have been isolated for transplantation. Skin stem cells are being used for burn victims. Islets transfers perhaps can be thought of as stem cell. The Edmonton Protocol might be another type of stem cell transplantation. So that exact l

Health committee  It was multiple sclerosis.

Health committee  A rather mature clinical trial has been under way for many years; over 30 patients with severe MS have been transplanted. They receive an autologous bone marrow transplant of purified hematopoietic blood stem cells. Essentially, this reboots the immune system. You have to receive

Health committee  Scientists don't like to talk about breakthroughs, first of all. It's an incremental process and it's a research continuum that starts at the bench and ends up at the bedside. We need support at every step of the way to move findings through that pipeline and to implement them to

Health committee  I can speak to that. Without question, researchers are working with all of these cell types. We need to compare and contrast them. And they're being used for different types of therapies. So iPSC will not replace everything else, and neither will embryonic stem cells be used for

Health committee  Perhaps I can address that. Certainly the system is very bureaucratic, and we have overlapping jurisdictions and we have contradictory aspects for the different instruments.

Health committee  Good morning. Thank you very much for your invitation to testify today. I'm speaking to you as a Canada research chair, a senior scientist and director of the regenerative medicine program at the Ottawa Hospital, and also as scientific director of the Canadian Stem Cell Network

Health committee  I'll slow it down. I'm sorry. It's too much coffee this morning. Embryonic stem cells are derived from four-day-old to five-day-old embryos. These embryos were created for the purposes of in vitro fertilization and would otherwise have been discarded. These embryonic stem cells