Thank you.
Madam Chair, we at Health Canada would very strongly support the idea of cooperating in international registries. This is a very key aspect of the rare disease world.
How you enter very important information into registries is a key question. So coordinating internationally is a very important issue. That's why having these discussions among regulators about how to study drugs that are otherwise very difficult or impossible to study so that we can be very clear about the requirements is very important.
A new international consortium has been developed. It is actually chaired by a Canadian, Paul Lasko from CIHR, and I think we can be very proud of that. This consortium coordinates research of this kind, very small research, so we need to link countries together. There are over 30 countries in this consortium. Its purpose is to focus research and make sure we don't have redundancies. So lifting registries into the important study of both the disease and the drug and trying to learn as much as we can from them is a very important aspect of regulating.