Yes, absolutely.
I think our major wish for Canadians who are living with this disease is that they have access to hope. I think that is the thing. You heard also from Durhane of the same kinds of issues. When we don't know the cause or the cure for a disease, hope is the best thing we can offer people. That's what we hear from Canadians across the country.
As I said, 747,000 Canadians are living with this disease today. It's going to balloon to over 1.4 million Canadians in the next decade or so. This is us. This is our parents. This is our sisters and brothers.
We said that in 2011 the baby boom generation started turning 65. We have this enormous wave of people who are coming. We know that the impact on our economy is going to be tremendous, and without any cure, without any treatments that are helpful to people, the cost will not be able to be contained.
When we see the investment that's been made in diseases like HIV/AIDS and cancer, although the people who are living with those diseases are not cured, they certainly have the ability to live with more hope than people with dementia have right now. We hope that this kind of agreement interest will create interest in doing research and innovation in Canada, and also offer people with dementia the opportunity to access clinical trials as well. That's hugely important.
We have a project right now where we're trying to encourage people with dementia to participate in clinical trials. We know there will be an increase in research dollars, and thankfully the Canadian Institutes of Health Research is putting more dollars into dementia research and the Alzheimer Society of Canada funds dementia research. But we know that in order to get the approximately 15,000 people required over the next few years to participate in all these studies, we need 150,000 volunteers to do that.
We want to maintain this momentum. We want to maintain the access to hope for our folks who are living with the disease. That's our priority.