This partnership began in 1999 and it was a tripartite relationship among Muscular Dystrophy Canada, ALS Canada, and CIHR central, at that point in time. Each of the three parties agreed to put in $550,000 a year. So there was $1.65 million available in what's called the neurological research partnership, or NRP, for short. It's still in place ten years later.
We use CIHR to do the peer review, and each of the three parties pays the money out directly to whichever researcher is successful. In the early days of the partnership there wasn't enough ALS research out there. There wasn't enough scientifically meritorious research in neurological diseases to spend all the money. That's changed. The NRP became the only game in town for the research community in neurological diseases in the early 2000s. We got to the point where, yes, we were not only spending the money, but there were quite a number of highly ranked research grants that couldn't be funded because we ran out of those dollars.
So probably somewhere between three and four three-to-five-year grants in neurological disease research are granted every year.
I don't know, François, whether you've had an NRP grant, but an awful lot of the ALS researchers in Canada have.