I absolutely think there's a way. I think you really hit the nail on the head in that one of the problems is that we see everything working in silos. We have a complete lack of transparency between different institutions.
I want to bring up the Neuro in Montreal. They have started an extremely interesting initiative. The head of the Neuro got so frustrated with the slow development that he said they were going to open it all up. They were going to open up all their data to everybody to see if they could speed things up. They saw really dramatic changes in the ability they had. We call it the “open science” approach. The open data has already made big transformations there in terms of the rate at which things are going.
Think about applying that on a larger scale. Just imagine what we could do. I keep going back to DNDi, but it really is one of the premium examples of how that openness and that sharing and that breaking down of the silos has resulted, in a very short space of time in pharmaceutical drug development terms, in incredibly important new drugs, whether they've been combinations of existing drugs in a new way, which was one of the first things they did for malaria with artemisinin and then the combination, or very new drugs, such as the one produced for sleeping sickness.
I think that collaboration requires openness. It requires sharing of data. It requires collaboration between academic institutions. Again, that's why I go back to universities and the importance of universities. Also, then, from the federal side, there's the importance of the public funding that's given by the federal government to these institutions. You can put conditions on that. You can say that we will give you the federal funding, but you have to have global access licensing and you have to make sure you're open and transparent with your data.
You all know how difficult it is to get data on research. If I go to a university and try to find out what they're researching, it's practically impossible for me to do it.
Therefore, I completely agree; I think there are opportunities for collaboration. I think we have to go out and look for them and also create them.