Thank you, Madam Chair.
My question is for Dr. Edwards.
You co-authored a paper entitled “New approaches to rewarding pharmaceutical innovation”. And in it, you list some of the drawbacks to drug patenting. They include high drug discovery costs, decreased sales revenues and skewed research priorities that favour incremental changes to existing successful drug therapies over the development of therapies for rare diseases. You argued instead in favour of public funding for basic research, clinical trials and royalty or reward-based schemes. Would medically innovative drugs cost people less if public funding were in place?