Yes, absolutely. When we talk about stem cells being the biggest innovation in medicine in the last 50 years, it's because stem cells actually are focused on treating the root cause of disease rather than treating conditions. We're looking at a health care system on which we spend more than $200 billion a year, and two-thirds of it goes to direct treatment costs of currently incurable diseases.
Most recently, an Ottawa group published in The Lancet a study dealing with multiple sclerosis patients, using the same stem cell transplant protocol that has been used for leukemia and applying it to MS. Now they have patients who are 10 years post-transplant who were full-time in rehab centres 24/7, needing to be fed, whose drug costs were close to $70,000 a year, and who post-transplant are now working full-time, are completely off drugs, are contributing, and are paying taxes.
We're seeing this in MS. We're seeing it in Crohn's disease. Diabetes is another big area in which the clinical trials are moving forward quite quickly. The Edmonton Protocol group in Edmonton is using now insulin-producing islet cells in their transplant program.
When we talk about relieving some of the stress on the health care system, we're talking about really trying to address root causes of disease rather than just treatment options.