My name is Bill Cameron. I'm a professor of medicine at the University of Ottawa, Ottawa Hospital, and I am speaking as the president of the Canadian Association for HIV Research, which had a large professional and academic interest in the proposal that was nicely described, if not the process of its creation and deconstruction.
Vaccine development nowadays is a complex and highly regulated process. I have a professional history myself in vaccine development in the pre-clinical area, where in animal models of infection I can provide a rabbit very good protection against an infectious disease--so of no interest to rabbits, only to humans. I cannot, as an academic and a clinical investigator, bring this forward into human beings without the good laboratory practice that is required. It is largely a documentary process for regulatory approval to bring a vaccine candidate or a vaccinogen into human clinical trials.
This is not going to happen in our lifetime. There is no economic model that makes sense to do this—it's just the right thing to do. And it's not going to happen because our corporate structures, our industries, and our private sector do not have the business model to make this a solvent exercise. Never mind intellectual property, it's the cost of the process of bringing a vaccinogen forward into human trials. It is unmet by industry. If this is in the public interest, we are going to require public funds to bring this forward. Private funds will not do so.
So if not our country through our government, then who? We can go asking for charity or we can ask our government to bring forward this opportunity. I would say that scientifically and technically we are at the edge of a golden age in infectious diseases and vaccines for prevention, for public health, that we have never had before. We have, in the same time, put forward an enormously complex, highly regulated, and expensive process for doing so, so much so that it will take $100 million to bring forward a vaccine candidate to the point of regulatory approval. If this is not going to come about through industry, then it has to come about through the public sector in some manner.
This explains why, as academic and professional or scientific investigators in vaccine development, we were so unhappy with the decision. We don't question the process. There were criteria—