Thanks for having me here today. I'll just give a brief introduction of myself.
I'm a Canada research chair in viral pathogenesis and control. I just moved back to Canada—it seems like I just moved back eight years ago—after being at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, for 20 years. I'm a virologist. I hold a number of patents and I have an expertise in viral pathogenesis, diagnostics and drug and vaccine development. Also, during the pandemic, we opened a new facility, a level-three facility. It's called the Imaging Pathogens for Knowledge Translation centre. It is a level-three facility that was opened just a few months before the pandemic in January. We had one of the most modern facilities that was open. Lesson to be learned: never be a virologist and open a new biosafety level-three facility just before a pandemic if you want a real life. Maybe it's the same in government.
Just to give you background on that, the ImPaKT facility has been working with about 30 different companies during the pandemic, several multinational companies, and we do global testing for antivirals, interventions, therapeutics, materials and vaccines. To date, about 30,000 retail outlets, government offices, schools, etc., house products to prevent transmission for which we tested as service contracts for companies.
We also provide waste-water analysis for about one fifth of the Ontario population through MECP in Ontario. Then we have contracts with Health Canada. We provide the detection of the sort of the frequency of the variants of concern across all ports of entry in Canada. That's through a contract with Health Canada. We report twice a week to the Public Health Agency of Canada and Public Health Ontario.
I just want to shift in the remaining few minutes to talk about the shift in the pandemic.
One of the things we realized early on is that this will eventually end, but the consequences of this pandemic will become much more severe, as the last speaker indicated. After the 1918 pandemic of flu and the 1957 and 1964 pandemics of flu, within a few years of those pandemics we saw a major rise in the increase of cognitive impairment and neurological decline and neurodegenerative diseases.
There's just been a study out by Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania that talked about people post ventilation in regard to COVID. Approximately 40% of those patients who survived the ventilation and COVID are now experiencing cognitive impairments.
In addition to this, the disease itself, the severity of the initial COVID disease, doesn't seem to be linked to the development of potential cognitive impairments in future, which then could be linked to these neurodegenerative diseases like ALS, Alzheimer's, or early onset dementia and Parkinson's.
The one thing that's an interesting observation, though, is that unlike those diseases that I just described, we don't know the triggers of those diseases and we can't identify when they occur. One benefit—if you will, which is an unfortunate benefit—is now that we have over three million people in Canada for whom we've defined when they got COVID, we can start working towards implementing potential therapeutics that are already available to us. The models that can be set up is through various animal testing models that are well-defined for cognitive decline. We can determine which therapeutics can prevent that in animal models post a COVID infection in those animal models, and then rapidly parlay that to off-label therapeutic trials of these immunomodulatory drugs, anti-inflammatory drugs and even antivirals, which we never could do before because we didn't know what the triggers were for those diseases that can manifest themselves sometimes 10 years, for even 15 years, in the future.
However, in all predictions, if we even have a low percentage of the population that goes down what we would call a “long, long-term COVID role” in neurodegenerative diseases, we are looking at a second wave of this epidemic that will inevitably be much more costly for the health care system.
The one good point is that we have a level of expertise in Canada that's really not replicated anywhere in the world. There have been good investments already in brain scans in a number of different facilities and research institutes across Canada. At Western, in particular, we have leading experts in cognitive impairment who were originally Canadians and were recruited back to Canada from Cambridge just a few years ago. They've set up testing platforms. We've brought in the expertise in therapeutics and antivirals to get engaged with that. There are many places around Canada that can also contribute to this, and be the leaders in the world in trying to combat this particularly devastating long-term consequence of neurodegenerative diseases, which we will likely see.
Thank you.