Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today.
I'm joined by my colleague Dr. Cindy Bell, who is our senior VP of Corporate Development and one of the founders of Genome Canada.
I'll make a few comments in French and English, so if you need your earpieces, this is fair warning.
Good morning, Mr. Chair.
We are going to talk to you about our industry, genomics, and the importance of health research in Canada.
Identifying which technologies to promote and nurture means understanding rapidly evolving science, assessing their potential and deciding which show the most promise. For governments, it means providing the environment and funding to enable researchers to keep at the leading edge. It also means shouldering part of the risk of helping discovery develop into transformative products.
Artificial intelligence, quantum computing and synthetic biology are some of the fields attracting attention.
Genomics is one of those transformative technologies, and it is driving innovation in health care today. However, as the Barton panel on economic growth confirmed, it is just as critical to other important areas for Canada: agriculture, fisheries, forestry, the environment, and even the mining and the oil and gas sectors. It has become the enabling technology for the bioeconomy.
The bioeconomy is at the core of Canada's economic past, present and, more importantly, future. Because of our enormous natural endowment, Canada has built world-leading industries in the agricultural food sector, in fisheries, in aquaculture and in forestry. If we add the public and private investments in health care, Canada is probably the most biologically centred economy of all of the OECD.
Genomics unlocks the genetic code, the operating software for the living world. To maintain and grow our natural advantage and to continue to expand our exports, Canada must continue to be a leader in the fundamental technology that drives biological systems. We can't be first rate on production and third rate on technology.
That's why we're here. Genome Canada was created by the scientific community with the support of the granting councils as an independent organization dedicated to harnessing its transformative power and accelerating the uptake into industry and public service.
Health is our single largest sector. About 50% of our funding goes to the health sector, but—usually people are fairly surprised by this—the other 50% goes to agriculture, the environmental sector and natural resources.
We're a specialist agency. We provide strategic funding, direction, management and oversight. We focus on large-scale research projects. We also convene coalitions of interested parties around shared challenges and opportunities.
We should note that the Canadian effort is best described as a national initiative rather than a federal one. While the federal government clearly led the parade on funding as first investor and 45% of our research funding is from the federal government now, 55% is from other partners: the provinces, industry, and Canadian and international foundations.
We are also deeply rooted in the regions, working in a collaborative network with six regional genome centres: Genome British Columbia, Genome Alberta, Genome Prairie, Ontario Genomics, Génome Québec and Genome Atlantic. It is very decentralized, just like Canada. It reflects our federal-provincial arrangement.
Genome Canada's mandate has evolved from the early days of genomics, when sequencing the complete gene set of a single organism was a monumental achievement, to today when scientists read hundreds or thousands of genomes during a project.
Nowhere is this more true than in health care and medicine, where genomics is driving a revolution called precision health or personalized medicine. The central idea is simple: each and every one of us has a very precise and differentiated genetic signature and our susceptibility to disease or how we respond to drugs varies from individual to individual based on this genetic signature.
Countries around the world are rushing to embrace the potential of these new tools. Just this month the U.K. minister of health announced an ambitious plan to sequence five million patients as part of a national precision health initiative. The United States has launched a $1.5-billion program to sequence one million Americans and combine that data with electronic health records. France, Australia and China all have ambitious national programs.
In Canada, we have launched a national initiative to implement precision health. Phase one of this initiative is actually focusing on rare diseases—a subject of interest to this committee, I think—and genetic disorders that impact roughly one million Canadians, mostly children. These diseases are notoriously difficult to diagnose and to treat. Building on Canada's strength in rare disease research and a wonderful regional children's hospital network, this pilot initiative will establish shared and effective policies, processes and technologies to establish a national system for Canadians.
The program will consist of three parts.
The first part is the establishment of a national rare disease cohort with 30,000 genomic samples from patients and their families. This will be matched with clinical data.
The second part is a national platform for data standards, consent forms and governance, working with the provinces so that we can aggregate provincial data.
The third part will be the establishment of regional sites that are linked together nationally to provide diagnostics across the country.
This project builds on the world-leading research led by investigators here in Ottawa at CHEO by collaborating with 21 other sites across the country through a program called Care for Rare. This team has so far identified 82 novel rare diseases—very high productivity—and has provided definitive diagnoses to over 1,000 patients who have been spared the long diagnostic odyssey. They continue to work with colleagues around the world to understand other rare diseases and to develop therapies to help these patients.
Dr. Aled Edwards and his colleagues will speak to the issue of developing affordable therapies for rare disease patients, which is one of our very innovative funded projects. We'll come back to that in a second.
I'll finish with a few words about the future for Genome Canada. We are scheduled for review and renewal of our funding in March 2019, so it's just around the corner. We have presented a strategic plan in our pre-budget submission that sets out a vision for Canada to be a world leader in biotechnology and the bioeconomy. We have requested continued federal support through a five-year contribution of $630 million from the federal government. This would be matched with partner funding of $680 million from the provinces, industry and our usual funding partners around the world.
This will drive discovery, translation and personalized health care for rare diseases. Over time it will roll into cancer, cardiovascular disease, pharmacogenomics and a number of areas that will be phased in as we move through this whole process.
It will also drive growth in agriculture, adaptation, fisheries and important resource industries from coast to coast to coast. We have a number of projects in the Arctic and around the boreal forest.
We respectfully request that the federal government consider our pre-budget submission to help ensure that Canada remains a world leader in the field of genomics research.
In closing, prior to being asked to come to the committee, we had organized Genomics on the Hill for next week, a public event right next to the House of Commons, where a number of these researchers I spoke of will be presenting their projects across the whole portfolio of health, agriculture and natural resources. I think you've all received invitations, but if you've lost yours, I have some spares, so I hope to see you again next week.
Thank you very much.