Of course. I appreciated Dr. Engelhardt's presentation very much. I apologize, Madam Chair.
I appreciate those difficulties, so I polled the heavies at the Canadian Association for HIV Research, and we have a consensus statement to make.
Industrial vaccine production capacity is a useful resource for industrial needs of corporations. On the other hand, if the public interest in vaccine research is to be met, public funding and accessibility of good laboratory production facilities are needed for investigator-driven vaccine research. These needs are not going to be met by corporate and private interests; they must be met by public interests if we are to serve the public's needs.
Twenty years ago, the Medical Research Council of Canada told clinical researchers who were interested in conducting clinical trials to go to industry, that the MRC did not have funds to support clinical trials; these were done by industry. We discovered very quickly that industry does not meet or serve the public interests or the academic interests in clinical research. They make pills to sell.
CIHR, the reincarnation of the Medical Research Council, has since learned to fund randomized controlled trials—clinical trials—publicly. We have established a very productive Canadian HIV clinical trials network to actually execute investigator-driven clinical trials, which are conducted in order to serve the health care needs in management, not just in new drugs, for clinical trials in HIV. This was a necessary and fruitful step. It came from the public sector. It did not come from industry.
The same is true now in vaccine research. If we are going to have the capacity to take investigator-driven discovery and invention that our universities are capable of away from bunny rabbits and into human beings under good regulatory surveillance, we need the public funds to support GLP—good laboratory practice—facilities for production of vaccine candidates suitable for human clinical trials. This is a requirement. It's not going to come from industry.
When this study shows us that the capacity to produce vaccine candidates who might be put forward by industry is met in industry, that same capacity does not address the creativity of discovery that will come from academic and scientific endeavours at our universities. This is a large potential contribution. Its potential in discovery is greater than what can be pursued in industry in the sense that it is more diverse and there is more risk taken.
We do not have the candidate HIV vaccine right now. We need to discover it, and it's going to be discovered in human clinical trials. Right now, we have several under way, but they're huge. They cost hundreds of millions of dollars and they are conducted according to the corporate and industrial agenda. If we want discovery and we want to tap our universities' capacity, we will have to provide a little bit of the industrial capacity to those researchers--not through industry; it doesn't work that way. It has to be provided from the public sector.
Thank you.