My perspective, and again, this is based on 10 years of really talking to everybody involved from the patient side and the research funding side and the side involving the VHOs, has been that we do need to start thinking about a national strategy that has to do with the whole brain, because of the commonalities. Some of the questions that have been raised have been linking concussion or brain trauma to Alzheimer's. And there are other types of diseases. One of our science leaders is involved in cancer research at SickKids in neuroscience. His lab is now doing Alzheimer's research, because they're discovering that certain cells and how they age is linked to eventually what happens with Alzheimer's cells.
There's so much crosscutting that I think we'll lose a lot of the potential we have in this field if we don't start to bring all these pieces together and understand how all of them fit together in an overall strategy. This does not take away from the fact that patient experiences for these various conditions may be different. That's why I think that the work the voluntary organizations are doing is really important.
But we've all come together on the basis of the science case, because we've all understood as voluntary organizations that there is a common thread that links us together. Maybe if we start working together and consolidating our efforts we can do even more in this field. Rémi mentioned CIHR; they've certainly been a leader in stimulating this type of mindset of collaboration and bringing community together.