Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  Yes, certainly money is an issue, but it's the role of the federal government to support research. There it's not a matter of an issue with a government of a province. There, to have a national strategy in terms of the research component, in addition to guidelines, certainly it's the place of the federal government.

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  No. The excellent category I would say would be about 25%. There are maybe 10% of grants that are not funded that should be funded.

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  Yes, in the field of Alzheimer's disease, there will be five times as much as that left on the table. What's left on the table, and we should probably say that this is in the excellent category, because below that we don't want to necessarily fund, there are certainly some excellent grants that just miss the cutoff and are not funded.

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  Five teams have been funded in the context of the partnership between Quebec, Canada, and France. Some are working on the role of prions, a protein, in diseases of the brain. It's based in Vancouver, with some people in Quebec and some people in France. Then there are other animal models.

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  Most scientists who will be successful, people we have referred to here, will have at least three to four grants from CIHR, and then grants from the Alzheimer's Society of Canada. Often they will have some grants from the United States. To be able to properly run a lab in Canada, to be internationally competitive, you need maybe five of these grants, and all will have deadlines that are different during the year.

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  Maybe just to add a little bit, this group at McGill, in partnership with a group at Harvard, has a large grant from the U.S. army to try to test this drug, this beta blocker, in the treatment of PTSD. Hopefully we'll have a response on a fairly large cohort of subjects very soon.

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  Yes, football players and those in other types of sports have a lot of head injuries, and we know that head injuries are a factor in the development of Alzheimer's-type dementia. So the head injury part is not a good thing for boxers or for football players and so on. When we talk about physical activity or red wine, it also always depends on your background, your genetic background, how you're made, and also the lifestyle you have.

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  The Alzheimer Society of Canada is part of the coalition that Inez talked about, and it is a partner with us. We are working very closely with them in developing the international strategy that I talked about. The numbers they have are real. We all mentioned them, so it's billions of dollars.

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  Basically, some of them will be a bit more virtual. Others, such as where Weihong Song is, could be physical. At McGill, it could be physical because we have a node of people who are able to look at Alzheimer's disease from different perspectives. But in other places, like here in Ottawa, there'll be a few people that are experts in Alzheimer's disease, not enough to have a centre, a physical centre here, but they will be associated with the centre in Toronto or with some other centre in the country.

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  I think, in a sense, I'm in agreement with what others have mentioned, and that's to create a very strong network of Canadian experts, to have core centres in the country that will be expert in clinical research related to Alzheimer's disease and dementia; an animal model; brain banking, because brain banks are very useful for us to look at and see what's wrong in an Alzheimer brain; health services research, such as how we organize services in the country and access to care for persons suffering from dementia.

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  Yes. It would be a bit like in the United States, where they have now 28 of these Alzheimer's disease centres. Each of them is funded to the level of about $8 million to $10 million a year. We don't necessarily ask for that in Canada, but each of these centres should have at least a budget of about $2 million to $3 million per year.

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  There are three other things that are also, of course, very important. We need to have a training ground to train the next generation of scientists and clinicians in the field of brain research, and in this case Alzheimer's disease. That is very important. Weihong here is very young, but Serge and I are getting a bit older.

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  Well, in Canada at the moment, at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the average grant is about $120,000 per year. And usually this is for five years. Most of the grants are five-year grants.

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  If we compare it with the U.S., the model is a bit different, but there it would be twice as much as that. That gives you the figure. I think if we were able to go to what we call an individual grant, at $200,000 per year for five years--so a block grant of $1 million for an investigator--that would be much more competitive than where we are now in comparison with the United States, with Germany, and with the United Kingdom.

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  If you want me to start on a wish list, my wish list is quite long.