A lot of this kind of research goes on, and thank you for mentioning Dr. Cullis' work. He developed the lipid nanoparticle coding for the mRNA vaccines. Dr. Cullis would be the first one to tell you that it is built on 40 years of research funded by the Government of Canada. It was fundamental basic research when it began and over the years, as they started to see different kinds of applications, it became somewhat more applied and then moved out into an industry start-up to further develop it.
That's one story that's similar to many stories at UBC which have gone from basic research within the lab to actually changing the course of a particular industry sector. Another example would be Carl Hansen's work on antibodies for various different kinds of diseases, including SARS-CoV-2, and he has taken that out in a start-up that is now a billion-dollar company named AbCellera.
I could go on and on with those stories. What is important with them is they started from curiosity-based, investigator-led research that was fundamental. No one saw those particular uses when these individuals were trying out things that people had never thought about doing, then through many years, they were able to take it forward and started to work with different types of partners to investigate how things could be applied.
One of the hard things to understand about the research landscape is that we need that whole spectrum. It's an ecosystem approach to really get through to the innovation capabilities, and that's not only at the universities. It's our college partners, who are producing talented individuals who can help run the manufacturing plants or do the biomanufacturing, etc. It's our people in art and design colleges who can help interpret descriptions of research results to provide to families with autistic children.
What we have to look at is the entire ecosystem that helps feed into innovation, and recognize that we need to fund different parts of this overall ecosystem and pipeline.