Yes, you're absolutely right. Right now, the pathway is effectively a licensing agreement. Someone discovers something, and then it's handed over through an exclusive licence. I'm simplifying things significantly here, but let's just work with that. From that point on, things are developed and bought up. There's a whole spectrum of things that happen, and as Dr. Eyolfson mentioned, it's complicated and expensive.
What our experience shows is that at that point, as opposed to issuing an exclusive licence that effectively grants a monopoly to develop and deliver something, partnerships that bring many of the same actors together within a program—if you want to call it that—still have the ability to develop and deliver these products. We have many of these capabilities that exist within publicly funded institutions anyhow, or industry brings certain things to the table. At a very early stage, we'll say that the universities or the health charities are able to coordinate the clinical trials and that industry is necessary for manufacturing capabilities and marketing capabilities, or whatever it may be. We define those things very early on, at the point of issuing that licence.
It is entirely possible to start setting these parameters. Canada can create that mechanism and create that framework to develop and deliver these things as opposed to stopping at the point of funding discoveries that are then commercialized, and saying, “Hope it works out.”