Health committee  Certainly. It is still early days and there's no question these investments have brought Canada to the forefront of nanomedicine and nanotechnology as applied to health. It is still, in many cases, very experimental, but we see a huge promise for new ways of delivering drugs, f

Health committee  I think we partially answered that question. There are several aspects to the signature initiative. It's the initiative I talked about on personalized medicine that is co-funded with Genome Canada. I must add, talking about leveraging—I had a question on leveraging—that we're i

Health committee  I'm totally convinced it will.

Health committee  I think, quite frankly, that CIHR doesn't have a lot of red tape. Our operating budget is between 5% and 6% of our total budget, which is among the thinnest operating budgets in the world for an agency of our type. I don't think there's a lot of red tape. How do we manage that?

Health committee  I gave a partial answer to that question to your colleague. It's aiding through the grants directly because a lot of people are hired on the grants. That's certainly an important economic investment. As I said, some of these discoveries will lead to patents. Patents will lead to

Health committee  Absolutely there are. For one thing, we are starting to better understand, through genetics actually, certain genetic predispositions in mental health. Through epigenetics, we're starting to understand how the environment, external events, will act on your genome and modify chemi

Health committee  In fact you are touching upon a very important topic of how we adapt to these new technologies and the human factor in the adaptation. The type of research we are funding is all about discovering these new technologies and, I believe, not enough about how we cope with those new

Health committee  I think my colleague, Brian, could also tackle this one. We're obviously trying to maximize it. Do we maximize it now? No. The current statistics tell us that between 25% and 30% of medical acts or lab tests being done in the current health system are, in fact, useless or even ha

Health committee  Sorry.

Health committee  Look, you're totally right. We're lagging behind. Let's face it, let's admit it, and let's do something about it. I don't think it is a question of research. I think we have the technology. We're funding a lot of exciting new technologies, for instance, using new apps to access h

Health committee  We are only at the very beginning of this. It is starting to be implemented for cancer in particular. We are starting to see a number of types of cancer for which there are biomarkers and we know which tumour is going to respond to which drug. As a result, we can give such and su

Health committee  Let's be clear. Our grants and scholarships budget has in fact been reduced this year by $15 million, but the government reinvested $15 million into our budget for the patient-based research strategy. Therefore, our grants and scholarships budget was completely protected in the l

Health committee  It involved $15 million recurring, and this loss has been compensated in a recurring manner. It won't be $30 million next year, but $15 million. This lost $15 million will perhaps be compensated. We'll see in the next budget.

Health committee  At the MaRS Centre, we're looking, first of all, at the area of brain research and new technologies in neuroscience. Canada is doing well across the board. We're one of the top countries in the world in terms of the impact of our publications in that sector; and in certain areas

Health committee  I want to point out that we're working very closely with the provinces to set up what we call the patient-oriented research strategy. We want to develop mechanisms to support research that is focused on what we call intervention research—supporting interventions, evaluating inter