Thank you for the opportunity to address that question.
The Brain Repair Centre is a medical neuroscience institute, as you well know. By using the word “medical”, that basically means the patient outcome is really the final outcome. In all of the research we're doing, we're actually thinking about the outcome for the individuals who are facing the disorders they have.
We've developed a system at the Brain Repair Centre to focus on three main areas. They're very inclusive. One is neurodegeneration. You can break it down that most neurological disorders that occur in aging have to do with neurodegeneration. There's a neurodegeneration research group. There's a neurodevelopment group.
Neurodevelopment starts as early as in the fetus, but it also continues throughout life, and certainly in adolescence, where there are a lot of developmental issues that we don't think are development issues, such as autism, schizophrenia and the emergence of things like bipolar disorders. Those are really developmental disorders, and that's another main focus.
The third main focus, because we have a localized strength in that area, is on mobility issues, and particularly mobility issues that pertain to mobility from spinal cord disorders. That would be spinal cord injuries and diseases of the spinal cord, predominantly things like ALS and spinal muscular atrophy.
Those are our strengths in what we do. We're very collaborative. I think what we've done successfully is that we've connected with all institutes across Canada. This is a recurring theme. There's collaboration right across Canada. We've set up a network of institute directors across Canada to make sure we're talking together frequently. That's part of a brain strategy that we're working on right now.
More locally, I think it's important that we're working outside of Halifax and including the strengths of New Brunswick and P.E.I. We haven't reached out to Newfoundland yet, just because of time at this point. We would like it to be a maritime or Atlantic Canada initiative.
With regard to how we are addressing the patient, again, it's benched to a bedside approach. I think that's always important. It's terminology that's used very often, but I think it's often...I wouldn't say misused, but not taken as seriously as it should be.
A lot of our scientists are actually clinical scientists who come into the lab because they're faced with problems. For example, Dr. Adrienne Weeks is a neurosurgeon who specializes in brain tumours. She takes the problems she's faced with in the OR with her patients and she brings them into the lab.