Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for the invitation to come and speak here today.
For some background, I am not just a drummer in a rock band. I am the director of the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research at McMaster University, where we are bringing together a multidisciplinary team of over 30 clinicians, microbiologists, chemists, biochemists, and mathematicians, and over 200 young people training in this area as undergraduates, graduates, and post-doctoral fellows. Our objective here is to change the challenges you've just heard about so eloquently from the other presenters.
I've been working in this field for 27 years. I started as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, working on vancomycin resistance when it first emerged in the Boston area, and I was involved in the team that actually figured out the biochemical mechanism of this. Before that, vancomycin was known as an “irresistible antibiotic”. That is, we thought there was no way bacteria could become resistant to it. It turns out, of course, that this is false. It is false for all antibiotics. All antibiotics are susceptible to resistance. There is no such thing as an irresistible antibiotic.
Since I came back to Canada, my team and I have published over 250 publications in this area. We are working incredibly hard to solve this problem. We have also discovered a brand new compound from a soil sample in New Brunswick that actually inhibits resistance to carbapenems, and this is now in preclinical development. We are trying to do the whole gamut, at McMaster.
Antibiotics have really changed the way we die. Prior to the antibiotic era, almost half of us would die of an infectious disease. Now only 3% to 4% of us do. This is a remarkable achievement.
Antibiotics are also very special molecules in a different way. An analogy that is often used is that antibiotics are like fire extinguishers. Fire extinguishers are great for putting out fires, and that's what we use antibiotics for when we have an acute infection. However, fire extinguishers are also great just in case you have a fire. Antibiotics are there to enable us to do all sorts of incredibly risky procedures in medicine that, prior to the discovery of antibiotics, we simply couldn't do. We couldn't ablate someone's immune system to treat their cancer, safely transplant a heart, put in a new hip, or take care of preterm infants without infection control—in particular, the acute infection control given to us by antibiotics.
The other thing that's special about antibiotics is that they are unique among drugs. They are susceptible to evolution. You will never evolve resistance to your blood pressure medicine, your birth control pills, or your cholesterol-lowering agents, but bacteria will always evolve resistance to antibiotics. It's just part of the world of biology. We have discovered, in my lab, that antibiotic reaches deep back in time. We have identified resistance elements in Yukon permafrost. This has been around for a long time, and there is no way we can actually solve this problem completely. This is something we have to continue to fight on a regular basis.
This is where the crisis comes from. The drugs we have relied on, which were discovered mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, are no longer working.
I have some personal experience with this. I actually got a blood infection caused by a salmonella that was resistant to ciprofloxacin, which was the first drug I was put on when it was revealed that I had this thing. I know first-hand what it's like to have an antibiotic fail. I also know first-hand what it's like to have an antibiotic in an IV bottle that actually works, and the difference that 24 hours will make when you have this situation is stunning.
We, in Canada, have to address this crisis with the intensity it deserves.
You've heard all these predictions of the economic impact in the future, the current economic impact, and the impact it has on lives, but let me tell you a story right now. In our hospital at McMaster University, one of our clinicians, whom I was talking to yesterday, is dealing with a patient who has multidrug-resistant pseudomonal isolates in the lungs and also recently got a multidrug-resistant klebsiella infection. The chances are this person is going to die. They are going to die because we have drugs that no longer work. They wouldn't have before, but the resistance is causing this problem.
So what are we going to do? The reality is that the pharmaceutical companies, as you've heard before, cannot be relied on to solve this problem. We're going to have to solve this problem ourselves.
The AMR framework that was released by Health Canada is a great road map. It emphasizes stewardship, surveillance, and innovation in discovery. I want to speak in particular to the innovation in discovery element. Just to calibrate, in Europe the effort to stimulate antibiotic discovery is being resourced by the innovative medicines initiative to the tune of 700 million euros. We heard about CARB-X, and that approach is $500 million U.S. Canada is nowhere to be found on this scale yet. We have to do something about it.
To deal with this, my colleague, Bob Hancock, who is at the University of British Columbia, and I have collected researchers and academics in small and medium-sized companies across Canada in governments and not-for-profits working in this area in Canada. We call this network the Canadian anti-microbial innovation network. What we're seeking to do is raise awareness to this problem and also provide an opportunity for investment in what we are good at in Canada.
One of the things that was discovered in Canada is a compound called tazobactam. It is an inhibitor of drug resistance. It was discovered at the University of Alberta in the 1980s. Tazobactam is given to patients all around the world. It was created here in Canada, and I bet you have never heard of it.
We need to do more of this. We're good at inhibiting resistance. We're good at finding alternatives to antibiotics. We're great at finding new vaccines and in using modern genomics to solve this problem, in particular in surveillance.
At McMaster, we've created the comprehensive antibiotic-resistance database that is used every day by researchers and clinicians around the world. It is the most accessed antibiotic-resistance database in the world, and it has no funding.
The other thing I want to leave you with is that we have to continue to invest in this area, and Canada has to take its place on the world stage in this area. We have the ability to make a significant contribution in this area. We have the talent. We have the young people who want to make a difference in this area. We have the infrastructure that has been the legacy of things such as the Canada Foundation for Innovation. We are all set to go.
Just as Churchill said to the United States government back in the early 1940s, give us the tools. Give us the tools and we will do great things.
I'll finish there. Thank you.