I'd like to make one comment in terms of putting it in the context of what it takes to bring a new drug to the market. In other words, let's say we were to have a breakthrough finding today that we utilized to team up with the biotech industry or with large pharmaceutical companies to take a very specific target identified within the brain. Let's say that this would be perfect to treat Parkinson's disease. If such a breakthrough discovery were made today, as Dr. Stoessl alluded to, a breakthrough that's very interesting, the test of time would show whether it really was the big thing.
If the big thing were to be found today and if one were to look across the landscape of pharmaceutical development, we would see that it would take between 10 to 13 years to bring a new drug to the market, at a cost upwards of $750 million. Therefore, we would encounter an enormous scale of time and scale of cost to actually arrive, then, at that drug being licensed in the EU, in the United States, and by Health Canada.
So time is of the essence. As I remember vividly when the whole issue of stroke management came up--how we could treat stroke better--the central theme was that time is of the essence. I think this is exactly the same thing we face, because with every year that's passing, the expectation is that the numbers will rise for people with dementia or with neurological disabilities, Parkinson's among them. So the longer we wait, the more difficult it will be to stop the train and to reverse the trend. Time is of enormous essence.