Good afternoon, Madam Chair and honourable members. I'm quite grateful for the opportunity to speak to you as a Canadian academic working on the causes of and solutions to antibiotic resistance.
I'm a professor of biochemistry and biomedical sciences at McMaster University, where I have led a research team on AMR and antibiotic discovery since 1993. I founded the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research and the David Braley Centre for Antibiotic Discovery. I have advised industry, government and not-for-profits on antibiotic innovation for 25 years. I also founded a spin-out company based on assets discovered in my lab, to further develop new products.
The committee's attention to AMR is both timely and essential. I was a member of the Council of Canadian Academies expert panel that produced the 2019 report “When Antibiotics Fail”. We found that AMR cost Canada $1.4 billion in direct health care expenses and caused 5,400 deaths in 2018 alone. AMR poses an existential threat to Canadian health and prosperity.
My role as an academic researcher is to uncover the molecular basis of AMR, discover potential solutions and train the next generation of scientists. For over 32 years, I've trained more than 100 master's and Ph.D. students, post-doctoral fellows and technical staff, yet very few remain in Canada or continue to work in AMR research. Why is this? The reasons are structural. Canada currently has limited biotech and pharmaceutical R and D capacity, especially in antibiotic discovery. Rather, graduates are drawn abroad to vibrant biotech sectors in Boston and California and Europe.
In universities, building and sustaining an internationally competitive AMR lab in Canada is very difficult. Academic scientists work like small businesses. We have to recruit talent. We have to generate product, which in our case is high-impact, internationally competitive research, and we have to fund it. We do this through securing grants. In Canada this is primarily through the CIHR.
It's instructive to understand how these grants are given out. These are reviewed by volunteers in panels organized by scientific discipline. At the CIHR, however, there is no AMR panel. Instead, AMR projects are lumped in with projects in bacterial physiology, fungal biology and parasites. Contrast this with areas like cancer and cardiovascular disease. Even behavioural scientists enjoy multiple specialized panels. This structure disincentivizes young investigators from pursuing AMR work. Despite the global urgency, Canada risks losing academic capacity in this field.
What happens if you discover something exciting in a lab that might turn out to be a new medicine? Well, there we're very challenged as well. Decades of experience have shown that the biotech sector emerges from discoveries made in academic labs, yet Canada lacks early-stage funding mechanisms to bridge the gap between discovery and application. You'll hear about programs like CARB-X, which help internationally, but their domestic opportunities are scarce. Advancing discoveries sufficiently to be attractive to agencies such as CARB-X requires different resources.
A proven model that's worth emulating, I think, is the U.S. small business innovation research program, the SBIR. This provides competitive, non-dilutive grants to support start-ups commercializing academic discoveries. A Canadian SBIR-style program would foster biotech entrepreneurship, create jobs and accelerate AMR innovation. As an illustration, my lab recently discovered a new antibiotic, which we published in the journal Nature last spring, that targets several pathogens on Health Canada's priority list. We want to develop it in Canada, but without early-stage push funding and downstream pull market incentives, these assets risk moving abroad, along with their economic benefits.
In closing, I want to urge the committee to act on two priorities. I would ask you to support an increase in overall CIHR funding and create a dedicated AMR research stream to strengthen Canada's scientific foundation in this area. Second, I believe we need to establish a Canadian SBIR-like equivalent to ensure translation of discoveries from academia to industry and to ensure that Canadians benefit from homegrown innovation. I think Canada could lead in the global response to AMR and protect both our public health and our economy.
Thank you very much for this opportunity.