Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak today.
During my five minutes I would like to leave you with two key messages. First, if Canada is to build a globally competitive, productive economy, we need to build new partnerships: partnerships between government and the private sector, partnerships between academia and industry, and new partnerships between researchers and Canadians.
Second, if Canada is to reduce the escalating costs of health care and at the same time build a healthier, more productive society, I believe there is only one way to do this: through research and new partnerships between government and Canadians.
Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about.
Allow me to give you a few examples to illustrate what I am saying.
The first concerns building a globally competitive economy for the 21st century. CIHR has funded the research of Dr. Terry Snutch of the University of British Columbia for the past eleven years. Dr. Snutch is interested in how the electrical activity in our brain works. This is fundamental research that's long-term, but key, not just to understanding our brain but also to understanding Parkinson's disease.
Yesterday at the National Arts Centre we had a round table on mental health and the arts, which Diane Ablonczy attended, that included Parkinson's disease, chronic pain, and other neurological conditions.
But the work is so long-term, so fundamental, and so risky that industry would never fund such research. Dr. Snutch succeeded in identifying one of the first genes that acts as a gate or switch for the electrical activity of our brain. With that discovery, he set up a small spinoff company, called Neuromed, with a business plan to find new drugs that will alter the activity of this electrical gate.
The research that CIHR funded for the last eleven years was handed off to the private sector, which was prepared to invest between $5 million and $10 million in Neuromed.
But the story doesn't stop there. The research at Neuromed has gone so well that in June, Merck announced that it would invest close to half a billion dollars in Neuromed to develop new drugs for pain, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, and other neurological conditions. That investment—the largest in Canadian biotech history—is an example of the partnership through CIHR between the federal government and industry.
Governments fund the long-term fundamental research that industry would never support. Then industry comes in and starts to fund the next steps of the project.
It is worth noting that according to the latest data from Statistics Canada, 19%—or $900 million a year—of all private sector R and D in Canada comes from the biotech sector. That percentage and dollar amount are larger than R and D in the auto sector and also in the aerospace sector. This is a win-win for Canada: jobs and the promise of new treatments against serious diseases.
Now I'll go to my second point.
I will now address my second point.
On this second point, which is lowering or stopping the escalation of health care costs, increasing productivity, and building new kinds of partnerships, let me give you two examples of what we are doing.
As noted in Senators Kirby and Keon's report on mental health, mental disability accounts for between 30% to 40% of disability claims in the workplace, translating into $33 billion lost in annual productivity in Canada. To address this issue, our Institute of Neurosciences, Mental Health and Addiction and its partners have created an initiative on mental health and the workplace. New health research teams from right across Canada are now working with workplace organizations to create a knowledge base and to develop policy and interventions to improve the quality of life and reduce mental health problems in the workplace.
Our partners in this initiative are not the usual partners for a research funder like the previous MRC. They include the Canadian Labour Congress, the Institut de recherche Robert-Sauvé en santé et sécurité au travail, and the Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Board--new initiatives, new types of research teams, new partners.
Here is another example. More than two million Canadians have diabetes. By the end of the decade, this number is expected to rise to three million. A person with diabetes incurs medical costs that are two to three times higher than that of a person without diabetes. Last week CIHR-funded researchers Drs. Hertzel Gerstein and Salim Yusuf from McMaster University announced that their international clinical trial found a drug that reduced the chances of getting diabetes by 60%. That result offers hope for new strategies for preventing or delaying the onset of diabetes and its devastating complications. This trial was funded by three drug companies in partnership with CIHR. In today's Globe and Mail there's an article on Type I diabetes, or Juvenile diabetes, and the pioneering work of James Shapiro and Ray Rajotte, again funded in partnership by CIHR, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, and industry.
To conclude, the examples l have given you are meant to illustrate what CIHR stands for: excellence. Only the top 20% to 25% of all grants that come to us can be funded. We're problem-based and strategic. We partner with the provinces. We partner with industry. We partner directly with Canadians. We partner internationally, which is a perfect example of a proper role for the federal government in building a more productive, healthier Canada.
Everything we know about knowledge-based economies, global competitiveness, productivity, and health tells us that investment in research, particularly health research, is one of the wisest, efficient, and most prudent investments any society can make.
Other countries recognize this too, from the United States to France, Germany, China, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. They're not standing still. Their investments in health research over the past five years and planned investments for the next years all equal or mostly surpass Canada's.