Health committee  Thanks for having us. I guess it's your day of listening to geeks. I'm a professor at the U of T, Oxford and McGill, and an entrepreneur who has founded several companies, among which is Affinium Pharmaceuticals, whose new antibiotic is in late phase II clinical trials. When we

Health committee  The rules of patenting are that you may not patent something that has been prior art or in the public domain. Our organization rapidly puts things out there, and that prevents people from patenting and lets everybody use it all around the world.

Health committee  I prefer not to answer it that way. It's a business. I have investors. In my job, I don't agree with any of this. I run a charity, but when I was doing that, I had to make money for the investors, or the guys who ran the company had to make money, and that was the best deal on

Health committee  It could be, but remember what I said first. That is the model, and if we follow that model—which I no longer do—it will lead to unaffordable pricing, so again, we have that tension, right? If we increase the VC funding in Canada and build lots of little biotechs, all the profess

Health committee  No, I think you could license the regulatory protection that Max came up with, which is that it guarantees 10 years of right to sell, and you can license that right to a factory. There is no reason on the planet that industry has to invent medicines. Industry has to manufacture a

Health committee  If I understood correctly, one of the problems is that for most rare diseases there are no medicines at all. When you're talking about unaffordable medicines that parents are trying to get, that's what we're trying to fix. There's the problem of today, which as you say is how p

Health committee  I don't know how the treatment of these patients...but presumably, when we have friends like Kym Boycott at CHEO, they know all the network of folks. It's a very close community and it's close to these rare disease researchers. When it's not available in Canada, our regulators ar

Health committee  Okay. The Alzheimer's example is a great one. The beta amyloid hypothesis has been tested by about 10 companies. Probably about $20 billion has gone into that hypothesis. All the companies did it in secret. We're still no wiser as to whether that hypothesis is true or not for Al

Health committee  But it's also not true. They're allowed to patent the results and keep things secret; it's the publication that has to be in the public domain. The background intellectual property can be.... We have a story on one of the universities in England. For 18 months, we have not been

Health committee  There are obviously lots of studies about this. When universities started to own their intellectual property, it was driven by the American government when they passed the Bayh-Dole Act in the early eighties. That created that idea that it's too complicated for governments to man

Health committee  On the pharmaceutical sector, if you think of the corporate structure, the CEO has sales and marketing divisions that have CEOs in every country, and they have global research and development that invents the new medicines. There used to be some global research and development si

Health committee  You're too young to remember the days before this shareholder optimization stuff that Harvard Business School put out in the eighties, right? A company used to be described as the community, the employees, the company and the shareholders, all of equal value. With the shareholder

Health committee  I'll let my attorney take care of this one.

Health committee  I'll take this one. You need to remember that other scientists, like the ones around the table here, work at universities, and we're “unmuzzleable”, as it were. However, regarding the scientists that work in the government labs, my understanding was that they were told to keep o

Health committee  We don't represent the sector that was muzzled, but my understanding is.... Does anyone on the line know more than I do about the policies internal to the ministry of the environment, etc.? No? We would have to ask the ministries. The folks that I know in there are happier, so