Again, thank you to the committee and to you for this opportunity to share.
Health innovation has been a lifelong interest of mine. Actually, I think it's a calling and a passion. This is actually the first time I've organized some of my thoughts from over the past 40 years.
The business that I'm in right now is helping to start-up biotech companies, life science companies. If a university professor or somebody contacts us and says they have a cure for cancer, if we like it we form the company to provide the financing and the infrastructure to manage IP and all the rest of it. I get probably a dozen or two dozen a month, so we have lots to choose from. I've done 17 companies. In the last five years we've only done two because of the economic situation.
I've presented and shared with you six ideas, and I want to illustrate the six ideas through two stories that I'll share with you. I played a lead role in one story, a very successful Canadian story. The other is also a successful research story that I observed from a bit of a distance.
I've given you the six areas to focus on and some of them, as you would understand, overlap with and are the same as Dr. Tyrrell's and others'.
The first one is, of course, strengthening and continuing to support basic research. This is really a key underpinning to any commercial venture or technology for the future. There are many different stories, so I was pleased. I'm on the CFI board. I see what CFI has done with billions of dollars to transform Canada. It has been in world-leading research but it was dipping a bit. CFI has regenerated it.
I was pleased to see Minister Goodyear's announcement this past week on the NSERC funding. I think that's a really strong message to the community, and I support that. Even though I'm in the business of commercialization, I think this is an absolutely necessary part of growing in the future.
Venture capital is an obvious area, and we talk about it a lot. My point is that venture capital needs to be managed locally. The second story will demonstrate that. Again, the government is encouraging venture capital, which is good and it's a start, but we really need to have local management across the country for this venture capital.
The other thing that is really critical and what I think is actually one of the most important issues is teaching and nurturing entrepreneurship. That's what commercialization is all about. A lot of our universities are now teaching entrepreneurship in their business schools, but I don't think that's the place to start. I think it should start at elementary school, really a whole dynamic. When you get into the business world, it's competitive. You know that in your situation you compete to win a seat. Our kids are taught in hockey not to keep score, that it's all fine, and not to worry about graduating, and that they'll get through. I think that's been a misunderstanding of the need for nurturing. We need to teach competition and we need to teach entrepreneurship starting at the elementary school and all the way up. I think that's key for our success and even for Canadian productivity.
Procurement policies have been talked about. I think it's important and I'll demonstrate that in the first story.
Dr. Tyrrell mentioned the cost of regulatory processes. When I started in the business in the seventies, regulatory was an entirely different environment. Today it's very costly. It's ironic that in our hospitals, where we provide health care, there are substantially fewer regulatory processes than the regulatory processes you have to go through for drugs. Every single drug that is introduced to the U.S. under the FDA is presented to Health Canada. We have one-tenth the population and one-fifteenth the budget, and that budget is used to review every single drug that's been applied for under the FDA. It doesn't make sense. We have to coordinate our regulatory pathway with other countries. They do that in Europe, and we need to do it in Canada.
My sixth area is a bit of paradigm shift. We have a single-payer system. Canada has led in the world in terms of a single-payer social health care system. But we have a multi-provider system. I think GE provides MRIs with which it makes money. We have a policy that says we want to have socialized medicine and we have to integrate it, yet we have multiple providers. We could reorganize to have competition in order to improve efficiencies through a multi-provider system.
The first story I want to tell you about demonstrates some of these things. It is one I got involved with in the prevention and treatment of Rh disease. Many young people today don't know what Rh disease is. It's the incompatibility between a husband or wife when they marry. If the mother is Rh-negative and the baby is Rh-positive, the mother builds up antibodies and destroys the baby's red blood cells. It was a very traumatic experience in the 1950s and 1960s. Today, young people don't know what it is.
Dr. Chown initiated some basic research in Winnipeg that was world-leading. As a pediatrician and professor at university, he was impacted by the loss of these babies and became involved in the research, initially discovering why, and then the treatment, using an Rh immune globulin, a product extracted from blood.
He helped Ortho, a Johnson & Johnson company, do the clinical trials on the first drug in the 1960s and then read about a new and better way of making this drug from a German, Hans Hoppe, in Vox Sanguinis.
He took this new technology, which would lead to lower cost and improved treatment, to Connaught Laboratories, which was the pharmaceutical company in Canada. They said they were not interested. Later on, when I became involved, I approached Johnson & Johnson. They said they were not interested. So Dr. Chown said, maybe we'll try it in Winnipeg. He approached me—I was a Ph.D. student—and said, “I've read this publication about a new technology. Would you be interested?” I was 23; I had never really thought about drug development. But as a chemist, I said “Why not?”