Thank you.
Actually you mentioned the situation between the United States and the United Kingdom. In my example, I was using the United Kingdom as a very strong and positive model.
It goes beyond just the data protection that's afforded in the European Union for inventing new uses for established products. I'll talk a little bit about that, because it actually has something to do with my colleague's comments. In the United Kingdom, the biggest driver of cost containment is understanding an integrated health care approach that makes self-care--what people can do for themselves--a very big part of the National Health Service and so on.
The United Kingdom was a very early adopter of the idea of not just dealing with invention, which is the patent protection system, because there are two ways you can improve health care. One is through inventing new chemicals that will have a certain safety and efficacy profile. Another is by using innovation whereby you would take something basic and find a new use for it.
The beauty of having an innovation incentive through a data protection period for something that is well established is that you already know the safety profile. The product has been in use for maybe 10 or 15 years. It's gone well past its patent life. The product is no longer at a very expensive level. It's been genericized and so on. You say that you've done some research and that product that always used to be used for arthritis actually has a very good anti-hypertensive effect, and it's much safer than the current anti-hypertensives and probably will give better compliance, and so on.
If you do all that research in Canada, you will get nothing for it. You will be penalized, in fact, because the minute you invest all the money into research and into making an application, the Canadian government will say, “Thank you for that. Now your competitors may do it as well today.” In fact, they go so far as to publish the label copy and everything you as the innovator have provided.
In the European Union, however, you have one year during which the government will not allow competitors to use your data to gain market access. It doesn't mean they couldn't do so if they had their own data. But that is a very tangible health care spending effect: being able to spend less money in terms of research to find new uses for established drugs, (a) because the safety profile is already established, so you're only looking at half the equation now; and (b) if you can find a new use for an established product and you can make it available for self-care, the costs drop right through the floor because you're into an open, competitive market.
And by the way, the governments don't pay for those kinds of things. People take them, and quite frankly we're in a period now where more and more Canadians are saying, “Please help me help myself. I want to be responsible for my own health care.” We're at a very interesting point in time where Canadians--and indeed, Europeans as well--want to do more for their own health.
But unfortunately, as I pointed out in my presentation, Canadians will be at least seven years behind Europeans in terms of products they can use to lower the health care system costs and also help individuals.