We're entrepreneurs and we apply for funds and to competitions wherever they may come up. We tend to create collaborative teams in the way that's most likely to allow us to move the research forward wherever that may be around the world.
For example, in the European Union, they have this European foundation that studied diabetes, so there are mechanisms within Europe for more collaborative international-type applications.
We are eligible, for example, through NIH in the U.S. We can apply with U.S. collaborators. So there are mechanisms whereby we can collaborate internationally. There are other broader programs like the Human Frontier Science Program, which doesn't specifically target diabetes research but targets biology in general. Those specifically require that there be investigators and labs from different participating and member countries. I think it's an excellent question, and I think it would be a really interesting and potentially impactful funding mechanism.
We have a lot to learn from what we share with those other countries. One of the things those countries do well—I'll use Finland as an example—is to track babies from birth, doing biomarker analysis and some genetic analysis and tracking them as they go through to assess their risk of diabetes, to try to understand what those triggers are. It's expensive, but I think it would be really valuable to do that sort of research to track Canadian kids from birth as they proceed and follow those who go on to develop diabetes and then look retrospectively to see what markers, what genes might have been there that would have given them risk or triggered the disease.