I think the AMR framework that has been adopted by Health Canada is an outstanding road map to solve this problem. What has to happen is more than just a nice, shiny paper on a website. It has to actually come with action plans, in particular with resources that will actually collect the investigators working in this area from across sectors. That includes as well the fledgling private sector that is trying to help develop, for example, new drugs or new diagnostics, or technologies to help deal with this.
One of the areas that Canada has not done very well compared with other countries is helping especially small countries bridge the valley of death. The valley of death is “What do you do once you discover something and how do you actually develop it?” Drug development is very lengthy and incredibly expensive and challenging to deal with.
Other countries have developed...as I noted before, the IMI in Europe, and the CARB-X in the United States. They are, in particular, tackling this problem head-on because we used to get them from the pharma industry. The pharma industry is not going to do this for us anymore. Unless they can find a way to make as much money as a new blood pressure medicine out of an antibiotic, we're not going to see a significant amount of investment in that area. We have to help develop an ecosystem that will facilitate this.
I think the framework is an outstanding document to help do that, but what we need is innovation in all of those areas: innovation in stewardship, innovation in surveillance, and innovation in discovery.