Health committee  I have a very quick comment. Mining is a risky business, oil and gas is a risky business, and when they got started, there were flow-through tax credits to help encourage people to put money into those. That's how they really got their start in Canada. Biotech is a long-term,

Health committee  I'll just say that access to data is always held up by the privacy issue. Some provinces go to the privacy issue as a barrier to access to data, I think, and other provinces have found ways around this. I think we should be working across the country to make access to data so we

Health committee  I just have a brief comment. Another example of regulation is ethics approval for studies. Every hospital has to give an ethics approval. We have one Alberta health authority, and we should have one approval for ethics. Drug companies have moved clinical trials out of this countr

Health committee  The TPC program may have been replaced a little bit by the centres of excellence for commercialization and research, and I think they're going to work. But I really would echo that you've had some wonderful programs in Canada. We often put a horizon on them that says an NCE must

Health committee  Of course, if you carry the product a little further on, it's easier to bring in the private money. But let me just point out that the SBIR grants are $100,000 over the first year, and you can use that for patenting. A lot of your patenting costs are already covered by the SBIR

Health committee  No, you have to get this money early, and it has to come from governments. It should be a partnership between the federal and provincial governments. They're both saying there should be more commercialization out of universities. They cannot do it unless they come together in a

Health committee  It's a local issue, and the reason you can't get access to these databases is put up as privacy issues. Many countries have got over the privacy issues and found ways to get data unlinked with patients. Many of our organizations, our health care systems, are bureaucratic obstruct

Health committee  Yes, I would say the first one was Manitoba, and the second one is probably Ontario.

Health committee  Again, Michael Houghton brought the contrast that when the University of San Francisco had an important discovery, the patent costs were covered by the university right away. Here, they cover the first year, but after that, when the real costs go up, the universities back off. It

Health committee  Certainly in Australia they've had some issues with this and they've overcome some of them. New Zealand has done the same thing. Parts of the United States—the Framingham study, for example—have been famous all over the world because they've been able to get access to the databas

Health committee  No, I think you're absolutely right. That is a major problem. If you're a clinician, you may be able to finance this yourself, but a lot of the discoveries are made by basic scientists who do not have access to that kind of money. I should have said a little more about what I

Health committee  Thank you very much. I'll start with a brief background. I did my MD at the University of Alberta, my Ph.D. at Queen's, and my post-doctoral fellowship, sponsored by CIHR or the MRC, at the Karolinska Institute. I've served as the dean of the faculty of medicine as well as the c