Good morning, and thank you so much for providing me with this opportunity to speak to you on behalf of biomedical researchers in Canada.
My name is Shernaz Bamji and I'm a neuroscientist and a professor at the University of British Columbia. I'm also the president of the Canadian Association for Neuroscience, but I'm here today to not only speak on behalf of my members, who are over 1,000 scientists doing brain research in Canada, but for all Canadian scientists doing biomedical research.
I'm here to request an increase in our investment of fundamental research in Canada. We all know that investing in research will diversify and strengthen Canada's economy and will create quality jobs, but really, over the past 18 months, after we've seen the world ravaged by the COVID-19 virus, it's clear that investing in biomedical research is of utmost importance for the health of Canadians and people around the world.
As you know, in Canada, discovery science is funded by three main granting councils, collectively called the “tri-councils”. We are requesting a one-time 25% increase in tri-council funding and a 10% budget increase every year until funding levels are commensurate with other G7 countries.
Since COVID-19 is front and centre on everyone's mind, I'll share with you a Canadian success story. It's a story of my colleague at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Pieter Cullis, who has had a long-standing career studying lipid nanoparticles, which is a technology that wraps DNA and mRNA in a type of bubble so that we can safely inject them into animals and humans.
He started working on this back in 1995, but he firmly believed that one day this technology could be important for delivering therapies to patients. Along the way, he established collaborations with companies around the world, including BioNtech, which you guys probably know is a company in Germany that worked with Pfizer to generate one of the COVID-19 vaccines. If you received the Pfizer vaccine, you received a vaccine that uses lipid nanoparticle technology that was developed right here in Canada. I hope you are proud, because I certainly am.
This is just one success story out of hundreds, because of the investment that Canada has made in fundamental, non-targeted research. I say “non-targeted” because we don't know what the next needs of tomorrow will be.
The fact is that Pieter was doing his research back when the success rate for funding projects was higher. In 2005, more than 30% of grant applications were funded. Today, fewer than 14% of grant applications are funded, and I can tell you, as the chair of a research panel at CIHR just last week, there are many outstanding research projects, projects just like Pieter's, that will not get funded and, therefore, not get done.
Much of the data is pointing the same way. Canada is the only G7 country whose investments in research and development as a percentage of our GDP have actually been going down steadily in the last 15 years. Canada is now second to last in the G7 with respect to research funding. Not surprisingly, given this fact, the number of academic researchers, like me, per 1,000 people in Canada has been going down since 2011.
To show you what we are up against, in 2017 the budget for the National Institutes of Health in the United States was $30 billion U.S., while the CIHR budget was $1 billion Canadian. They spend more than 30 times the amount we do on research, but our population is only nine times less.
While the 2018 federal budget announced a historic addition of $689 million to tri-council funding, for which we are incredibly grateful, it is little more than just half of what was recommended by the fundamental science review report, which was commissioned by the government in 2017. Without this critical increase in funding, we will not be able to compete on the world stage. We will not be able to contribute to the next global health crisis, like we did with SARS and COVID—and there will be a next time.
Canadian researchers are ready to put in the hard work and we now look to you to help fund this work.
Thank you so much for listening.