Health committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to the committee. I am here on behalf of Genome Canada and I am joined today by Dr. Cindy Bell, who has been with Genome Canada since we were founded 20 years ago. It played an important science leadership role during

Health committee  I'm also thinking of the millions of Canadians who make sacrifices every day to help fight COVID-19. We're all facing extreme uncertainty, but we're showing a great deal of strength and resilience. The challenges facing our world—in human health and disease, climate change and

Health committee  I am happy to do it. Sorry about that. Why are we able to do this? It's because since 2000, the Government of Canada has made forward-looking investments to build Canadian genomics excellence through Genome Canada. I'll say a few words about who we are. Genome Canada is a uniqu

Health committee  These investments at the intersection of genomics and health care are leading the shift from a disease-oriented system to one that is more precise, personalized, predictive and preventative. Genome Canada has been laying the foundation for its implementation in clinics across Can

Health committee  Thank you for the question. To be totally honest, I am going to defer to the experts at VIDO-InterVac. The work we're doing will no doubt and hopefully support their very important and very good work, but we at Genome Canada are not in vaccine development in anything like the wa

Health committee  The $40 million, broadly speaking, that is going to go to CanCOGeN is split into two pieces. There's a viral sequencing element and a human sequencing element. On the viral sequencing element, it's really designed to do two major things. One is to use the mutations that accumul

Health committee  Perhaps I'll add a perspective from Genome Canada. We're not on the vaccine development side, but the network we're leading is going to be developing and generating an immense amount of data around both the virus and the number of the patients. Everybody who is involved, from p

Health committee  Not to my knowledge, no, but of course, one of the themes here is that there is still lots we don't know. No, at this point here, it's my understanding there—

Health committee  Absolutely. At this point here, I'm not aware of any of what we call more severe strains caused by mutations, but if one were to emerge, we'd want to catch it pretty fast.

Health committee  It's gets into a little bit of a definitional problem, I guess, and what you call a strain. There are thousands of variants now that you can distinguish, based on these mutations. I don't know whether they've been classified into distinct strains. I would defer to my colleagues,

Health committee  Perhaps I'll ask my colleague, Dr. Bell, to answer that. She has extensive experience with clinical research and the medical application of work—

Health committee  Sorry. I was just passing it to Dr. Bell, who is better positioned than I am to answer the question.

Health committee  Thank you so much for the question. Again, I'm going to pass to Dr. Bell, my colleague, who may be more familiar with those types of questions, especially with regard to SARS.

Health committee  Certainly I'll say from Genome Canada's perspective that the researchers as individuals are used to collaborating internationally. What we're seeing now is a more systematic approach to this and we're having a lot of international tools. For instance, there is something called th

Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I am very pleased to be here today on behalf of Genome Canada. I'm joined by Pari Johnston, who is our vice-president of policy and public affairs. Today I'm going to talk to you about genomics, which is the branch of science that looks at the mo