Thank you. That's fine.
I wasn't expecting to be next on the list, but I'm ready.
Thank you all for attending. I listened with interest.
Mr. Wright, you mentioned the “valley of death”. Of course, you are referring to angel financing. For those who are wondering what he was talking about, that is the period that you're in when you are developing drugs and you have nobody to finance you. We used to refer to those who financed those individuals as the three Fs; they were the family, friends, and fools. I don't know if you knew that.
This is the dilemma that's experienced in the drug industry. Of course, big pharma companies are the ones that produce our drugs. Generics are then able—once the patent runs out—to copy that drug, in essence. They can break it down.
We keep talking about the urgency to develop new drugs, but how much of that is really the problem that we experience today? There just isn't the market for big pharma to produce these drugs. Some of these drugs cost billions of dollars. The payback just isn't there if we readily spread these drugs about.
I think that happened in Africa with AIDS. There was a real push for the drugs to help eradicate that situation in Africa. Many of the big pharma companies just backed off and said, “Listen, if we're not going to get paid for this stuff, we're certainly not going to develop it.” How much is that?
I want to go to you, Mr. Brock, because I think you mentioned, or at least someone on the video mentioned, that we need to step up as a nation. As a small country, we're relatively prosperous. We're one of the G7, but nevertheless, we're not the Unites States of America. We're not even China or some of the others that have produced these drugs.
Maybe you could just comment on that. Tell us what other countries are doing, too.
Are you, sir, from the Netherlands?