Thank you.
Certainly a number of alternative models of research and development are under way around the world. There are organizations active in Canada. I'm probably going to keep coming back to the previous study because there were some very good comments that were made by the Structural Genomics Consortium. They're an open-science outfit that is doing drug development in a different way.
MSF is one of the founders of an organization called the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative, which is effectively a not-for-profit pharmaceutical research and development organization that has developed, I believe, seven different either new formulations of existing medicines—for example, pediatric HIV or anti-malarial combination therapies—or entirely new medicines, one example being a drug called fexinidazole, which is a treatment for human African trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness.
It's an organization that's guided by a core set of principles. They work with researchers, the pharmaceutical industry and the private sector, but I think the key thing behind the work they do, and indeed the work that the Canadian government should be doing at a federal level to create standards, is that the work is guided by a set of principles. Those are effectively that there's a need to ensure that the final products, whether drugs or vaccines, are affordable and accessible in an equitable manner to patients who need them, and there's a desire to develop medical tools that will be treated effectively as global public goods.
You do that by negotiating fair access provisions, with enforceable clauses and licensing agreements and contracts and so on that stipulate what is expected of any recipients downstream of the intellectual property—the data, the know-how, the substance of what's at the core of either drugs or vaccines—and that clearly stipulate how they're going to be priced, how they're going to be registered in endemic countries, how you're going to work with manufacturers to ensure global production and equitable allocation and so on.
There are actually many examples of how licences and different drugs and vaccines and so on can be developed in a different way. There are examples from the Medicines Patent Pool, from our organization, and from, as I say, DNDi, and I think the intent is not to replace the good work that's being done already in Canada but to recognize that we do live in a world where medicines are becoming increasingly unaffordable and expensive, including common sense safeguards. If we, the public, are paying to develop or discover something, we know the strings attached to it need to be fair-pricing clauses and an assurance that it's going to be made available to all patients everywhere who need access to it.