First, let me say I'm sorry to hear that story; that's very sad. Unfortunately, there are many similar stories across the country.
With respect to your question, sustainable, predictable funding for translational research is absolutely essential. You can't do clinical trials on a short shoestring from one year to the next. You can't build durable partnerships with industry or research institutions or charities on a short time frame. Nor can we do big international collaborations without that time frame that allows for the research to be done and seen.
When we're in the health research business, we're looking 15 and 20 years down the road. It's not like we're a young Ph.D. graduate out of Waterloo who's able to do something with his or her roommates in their dorm and then spin it out and commercialize it. We're talking about therapies that are meant to go into humans and so we need clinical trials, and clinical trials take time. Therefore we need the funding to help support those early stage clinical trials.
In the case of stem cell research, many of the trials that we want to invest in and need to invest in won't be picked up by the pharma industry because they're not necessarily about drugs.