Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. I will be making my presentation in English, but I would be delighted to answer questions in both official languages. Genomics refers to both the science and the technology that helps us decode life based on the genetic inform

Health committee  The process we went through to choose some of the projects—because you're totally right, we can't do everything—is that we allowed projects that were across the spectrum from prevention, early detection, treatment. We didn't say we're going to focus here, we're going to focus the

Health committee  Yes. These are being done by health economists. In fact, we have insisted that each project in the personalized health competition has integrated into the project team a professional health economist to do that work. There are a lot of studies. It's very different whether you're

Health committee  This area is called gene therapy. It's being experimented with in Canada, at a clinical level, for a specific gene, for a one-at-a-time kind of thing. Changing everybody's code at a more multi-genetic level will be hugely challenging. We're not there, but for certain diseases of

Health committee  Yes. Once again, for multi-genetic things, it's very tricky because for the eye, when it works, you can inject the gene into certain tissues in the eye. To change every gene, in everyone's body, in every cell in everybody's body.... That's very tricky.

Health committee  I'm more optimistic than he is.

Health committee  There are other things that are mapping towards attracting some of the translational stuff. You've mentioned some key ones that I believe are very powerful. As well you have this excellent interface between the researchers and the clinicians that we have in Canada. We can do wh

Health committee  Sure. There are a few things that we should mention here. One of them is that we've already spun out or enhanced 24 young companies from Genome Canada research. These are companies that have benefited from funding early in their lives. It usually started off as academic funding

Health committee  I think it's really to do with program design and targeting specific areas. Also, I know the government is very interested in putting more money into venture capital. That's very important. But Canada is a little too much of a risk-averse country. It's a cultural thing. I think w

Health committee  I think those are great examples. The examples of adverse drug reactions are key. Here's a phenomenon—90% of it will be genetic. We should have our genotypes. We should have our genomes going to the pharmacy and the pharmacists telling us we shouldn't have this drug because we ha

Health committee  That's a great question. Research is all to do with discovering new things, with creating new knowledge. Innovation implies some application. Innovation is something that a lot has been written about in Canadian terms, and we're missing some stuff in the innovation piece, the in

Health committee  Well, you can't have innovation without having some new research or something in the pipeline, right? You can apply innovation to knowledge that is existing, of course, but you can also apply it to knowledge that's very new. That's the kind of perfect storm thing: you have a seam

Health committee  There is no question that Mr. Edwards is giving an accurate depiction of the reality. What can we do? We can be more open to certain studies that don't involve the same series of genes. It's up to us, as a research-funding organization, to revisit our peer review systems, which

Health committee  There is tremendous potential because people are either at risk of developing these types of diseases or they are not. Knowing that information earlier in their lives is important. They don't have to wait until they are 70 years old to understand what's going on. As I see it, tha

Health committee  We have funded some projects. I don't know the details.