With a name like yours, you must have the same heritage.
In reverse order, of the countries that are currently investing in TB and drug research and are prominent, one is the U.K. One of the things they have done that is interesting is to create a rule that 3% of the development budget across the board will be invested in innovation and R and D. Every program, whether it's in health, agriculture, or anything like that, does spend 3% of the total development budget. If you're looking at the numbers, given the amount of money that even a small country like Canada spends on development co-operation, that would be a significant amount of funding.
Other countries that are active in this case, next to the U.K., are Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, and the U.S. We are very heavily reliant on foundations, especially the Gates foundation, which is a really big actor in this field.
The good news there is that in TB we have a valley of death that starts literally from the lead identification and goes all the way down to the patients. We are used to dealing with valleys of death. We have shown that in a public-private partnership, with sufficient government support, next to private initiative, you can create a new value chain that allows you to do the innovation that we've traditionally relied on fully from pharma.
I don't think there's a case to make for pharma being in or out. The connection is how we can organize ourselves globally in such a way that you can add the capacity for the academic community—the sorts of innovations that happened at McMaster that were mentioned—with pharmaceutical knowledge that can be in either a non-profit or a for-profit environment, with biotech and medium and small enterprises, and then bring together donors like Global Affairs Canada.
In terms of the money we're talking about in a disease like TB, as I mentioned, the OECD came out with the estimate that another $500 million a year would be needed to come up with four new antibiotics. If you take that in the context of the G20, that's $25 million a year. That's not a whole lot of money, even for a small country, to be honest, to set aside for investment in AMR innovation and research. Even that sort of money could go a long way already.