Evidence of meeting #116 for Health in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was universities.
A recording is available from Parliament.
NDP
Christine Moore NDP Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC
What should the federal government prioritize if it wants to make sure the results of health research are accessible to the public?
Humanitarian Affairs Advisor, Doctors Without Borders
I think it really comes back to this idea that we need to get the policies correct at the federal level.
The reality is that Canada contributes immensely to global health, to health research and to our understanding of population and public health. Our health researchers are productive and doing good things. However, we need the policies in place to say that we need to have a solid public return on this public investment. Universities and others who are recipients of public funds should have the policies in place to develop access plans and strategies for the products they develop and discover. This idea that you simply discover something that may be a cure for a disease and it's commercialized with no safeguards attached—I think we can do better than that.
Liberal
Kitchener Centre, Lib.
Ms. Kiddell-Monroe, I want to pick up on something you said that I think is very important. You talked about exclusivity and non-exclusivity, and I think that really goes to the heart of what we're trying to discuss here.
Just so that it will be on the record, could you expand on your idea of global access licensing, the difference between exclusivity and non-exclusivity, and why you feel non-exclusivity would really make such a big difference in drug pricing?
Board Member, Universities Allied for Essential Medicines
When you give an exclusive licence to one organization or institution or company, that gives them the sole rights to be able to exploit that licence. What happens then is that you get into a situation of monopoly. With the system we have now, that's usually with a patent attached to it. They last for 20 years, and then you get extensions, through what Mr. Lobb was talking about, and it can go on and on and on.
When we give a non-exclusive licence, that enables other companies to come in and be able to compete, or other institutions to come in and be able to compete, if there are found to be uses of the end product from that research that are very important for the Canadian population and for the international population. In fact, going to those 81 alternative models of R and D, they could also benefit.
For instance, let's say I'm a company and I get a non-exclusive licence for an end product of a hepatitis C drug that I want to sell for $1,000 a pill in the U.S. and Canada. However, they also need that drug in India and so on, and I don't want to produce it. Someone else can then come in and produce it at a price. They can use the information I have and they can fill it.
For me, then, it's something that could really benefit everyone. It's about making a jigsaw puzzle. This is where Jason's idea comes in around the collaboration and the way all these pieces fit together. For me, that's why non-exclusive licensing would absolutely open up the possibility of affordable and accessible medicines.
Kitchener Centre, Lib.
Okay.
Dr. Nickerson, in your opening remarks you talked about prioritizing health research that responds to public health needs. Could you just expand on that?
Humanitarian Affairs Advisor, Doctors Without Borders
Yes, absolutely. I briefly mentioned our experience with sleeping sickness, or DNDi's experience with sleeping sickness.
Sleeping sickness is one of these diseases that was horribly neglected for years. The treatment that was available 13 years ago was effectively to dissolve an arsenic derivative into something similar to antifreeze and inject it into people. That was the treatment that was available for this disease that affected thousands of people. There was no interest by the private pharmaceutical industry in developing subsequent therapies, and this treatment killed one in 20 people who received it.
Now, flash forward to the DNDi experience, which is, again, able to draw interest from industry, academia and a variety of different places. They found a compound, fexinidazole, that had been sitting on a shelf, underdeveloped and abandoned, for whatever reason. They acquired the rights to it and developed it. Do you know what? It works.
DNDi, over a period of probably a decade or more, has managed to drastically transform the landscape of the treatment that's available by taking on fexinidazole, which was simply abandoned, doing the clinical trials and bringing in partners from civil society, academic, industry and so on. They did that within a framework that attached safeguards on this development process and said, “Okay, if this actually works, we need a commitment from everyone involved that the final product is going to be affordable and accessible for people.”
The results of the clinical trial were published sometime in the last year, I believe, in The Lancet. It works. We've now gone from a treatment that killed one in 20 people to an oral therapy that effectively cures the disease in 10 days.
These are models that build collaboration and attach safeguards to them, and they're developing and delivering treatments. There is no good reason why we couldn't be setting the same priorities through federal funding agencies to say that there is a need.... Granted, we've had a discussion about priority-setting. It's complicated, but there's no reason why we can't say that there is a need; we're going to invest the resources that are needed into that initial stage of discovery; we're going to manage the process from start to finish; and, everybody who is involved needs to agree to the parameters of it so that we develop and deliver treatments in a timely and affordable way.
It happens, it works, and it's time for us to simply try it in other disease areas. It's possible to do it within the existing frameworks, but we need new programs that bring everybody together through the subsequent stages of drug development and delivery.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Bill Casey
What a great way to finish the day.
On behalf of the committee, I want to thank all of you, because you've given us incredible information in a way that we can understand. Hopefully, our report will do it justice and we'll effect some change. On behalf of the committee, I give you our thanks.
I want to thank the committee, too, for doing their homework and following this subject so closely.
With that, I want to say that next Tuesday we are back on diabetes. We're going to do a report on the report; we're going to do the drafting instructions for diabetes. We'll talk about drafting instructions for motion M-132 as well. We won't do it, but we'll talk about it.
Again, thank you very much for coming. We appreciate it a lot.
The meeting is adjourned.