Thank you, Madam Chair and committee.
I am the chair of research for Brain Canada, but I am also a laboratory researcher working on neurological and psychiatric diseases. As a scientist, I can say the reality is that there are no cures for neurological diseases. My feeling is that Brain Canada has one of the best opportunities to help address that.
So how are we doing that through our research program? As an American who moved to Canada 15 years ago, I'll just describe briefly why I feel Canadians are best poised to create breakthroughs in terms of neurological diseases, cures, and therapies. Also, I'll give you a few brief examples of the successes of our different research teams in our pilot brain research program.
When we set up our brain repair program, our first goal was to try to accelerate research findings into the clinic, but another major goal was to encourage the best Canadian scientists to come up with ideas that would result in breakthroughs and shift the paradigms of the field. If we have no cures for neurological diseases, we need new ideas.
What are Canadians known for? We're known for being innovative, new ideas, but also for working together. We work together and play together much better than Americans—coming from the U.S., I can say so. We also do this with what we call “bang for the buck”. Canadian researchers are funded to study brain diseases at about one-third of the level per capita of our American colleagues. Yet our research is known to be the equal to research in the U.S. We're known for bang for the buck. I've always said, “Imagine what would happen if you funded Canadian brain researchers at the same level as the U.S. What would we then be able to accomplish?”
Our teams are not meant to focus on a particular disease, but to find the underlying causes of multiple neurological diseases and conditions. So when a discovery is made by a team working on Parkinson's models, that will also be applicable, for example, to multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's, and epilepsy.
We also encourage a team and multidisciplinary approach. We want physicists working with biologists. We want Parkinson's researchers to work with Alzheimer's researchers. We fund those teams at ample levels—a half million a year—which is much more than our CIHR levels. We also want our ideas, when they're proposed to us, to be internationally validated, so Americans, Europeans, and Canadians look at those ideas and say that's the best idea they've ever heard for trying to cure or approach a neurological or psychiatric disease problem.
I don't know if I have enough time. I wanted to briefly tell you the outcomes of some of our teams. We have funded five teams thus far, out of about 30 or 40 ideas that were proposed to our international review committee. I'll just give you brief examples.
One is a chronic pain team where researchers at the Université Laval in Quebec City and at SickKids hospital in Toronto found one of the causes of chronic pain, and what they think is a major cause. Right now, over half the elderly and many people with diabetes, viral infections, cancer, and neurological problems have chronic pain, and only very strong narcotics will even begin to approach it. What they've found is that a cell in the immune system that normally fights infections is sending signals to our nerve cells to make those nerve cells hypersensitive so that acute signals, such a pinprick, become chronic signals. They now have generated a company as a result of those results to try to bring that to patients.