One of the big priorities we have right now is patient-oriented research. As I've mentioned before, we're doing pretty well in discovery, and it's pretty exciting when you listen to what's happening in the basic sciences, and that needs to continue. Where we've had problems is in bringing that to the patient, to the bedside. To be able to do that kind of study you need to have the kinds of resources that you have with industry, generally, to bring these things forward. So we work very closely with industry in that type of project. Sometimes we prove our hypothesis. Because these are investigator-initiated studies, they try to identify the projects and how to go through them, so that part of it--we'll call it the valley, or big need--needs to be worked out.
Another one is optimal practice, which, in this patient-oriented research initiative, is really how to bring what we know from the bedside into practice, into clinical medicine, and to be sure that we're getting the right drug to the right patient at the right time. There again, we need to work with different levels of government, but also we believe that industry, in well-organized and well-balisés...I don't know...well-delimited projects, can be very useful. Right now we're working very hard on patient-oriented research and trying to fill the holes we have, both in the translation of knowledge bench to bedside, and then the other one, from bedside to practice.
The kinds of decisions we make at governing council are large decisions like whether we should go to patient-oriented research, or whether we're meeting our mandate to help and improve health care of Canadians. Those are the kinds of things that we need to be making the decisions on at a high level.
There is the scientific council, which does make decisions about which exact projects and what the limits would be of each project, so the kinds of decisions that we're making wouldn't generally be affected in a negative way by having somebody like Bernard, but Bernard could help us understand how best to partner with industry to meet our goals, which are to improve the health of Canadians.
It's all done at a high level. We don't meso-manage or micromanage. The scientific committee is really the one making the decisions that concern many people in the community--not just the people in this room, but many people in the community.