Mr. Saini, you asked two big and broad questions. I'll deal with both because we've been working in both areas for about 20 years.
With Alzheimer's, it is a long-term process, and the current business model is that you need to get your results within a few years in order to make money from your patented drugs. Alzheimer's develops over 20 or 30 years, and there is recent data that suggests that the beta amyloid hypothesis is not wrong; it is factors in middle age that affect disease in old age. Therefore, we need mechanisms whereby we can study people for 20 to 25 years to affect the course of the disease. We have studies in which we intervened in the year 2000, and we're still counting whether that had an impact. This can only be done through the public purse at the moment, so I think a long-term national initiative on Alzheimer's, a 25-year strategy, would make sense.
If I may, I'll now switch to your second question on neglected diseases.
I'm a person from India, originally. I've worked in 100 countries, of which 80% are low- and middle-income countries in Africa, South America, and Asia. We've worked on three areas—TB pericarditis, which is neglected completely; Chagas disease, which affects 10 million people in South America; and rheumatic heart disease, which kills about 400,000 people every year in Africa, Asia, and South America. What we've been able to do is squeeze the juice from our western countries, take the drops, and invest them in those areas.
We have the largest research programs there. We've used that to write CIHR grants—this is where public funding becomes important—leverage that money, and institute some of the biggest studies in the world. We've been bringing people in and training them in Canada. We also send teams out to many of these countries to train people.
You're right; there is a big need for trying to address neglected diseases, but it can only be done by a model that includes not only open science but also open capacity-building in these countries. That's what we've been doing, and I think federal funding and corporate social responsibility become key to it.