Health committee  Let me give you a very clear example. Some types of breast cancer, for example, have receptors on the surface and they could be targeted by a drug. That does not apply to all types of breast cancer, but it does apply to some types of tumours. If some tumours have those receptors,

Health committee  That's correct. Our total budget is $1 billion and what's going to grants....

Health committee  Again, I wouldn't say applied research.

Health committee  It is something we're doing, and we're doing it increasingly. For instance you may have seen last week's announcement of our leveraging $12.5 million from a private donor to support a clinical research network in mental health in adolescents. That's really a fifty-fifty leverage

Health committee  First of all, that's terminology. Blue-sky research is roughly 70% of our budget; 70% of our budget is what we call open. In other words, it's investigator-driven. May the best win in terms of best idea, best mind. It is totally open. You're coming with your best ideas; it doesn'

Health committee  I knew you would be.

Health committee  Certainly. It acts on creating jobs at many different levels. For instance, it starts with the grant. As you know, we are giving out over $900 million in grants per year. These grants pay people. They pay students and graduate students. They pay for research professionals who wor

Health committee  As you know, we're supporting research. More and more we are mindful of the importance of evaluating the impact of these new technologies. The best example I can give is the recent initiative on personalized medicine that we've launched with Genome Canada. It's a major initiativ

Health committee  Thank you Madam Chair. Medicine is evolving incredibly rapidly. The future of medicine is a world where doctors use their smart phone instead of a stethoscope to examine a patient’s heart rate, a world where novel biomarkers will be used as part of early detection systems for ph

Health committee  Actually, I was cc'd on their letter, as you probably noticed, so I did see it. I would summarize this in two points. We've already alluded to the first thing—

Health committee  Certainly. Basically two points are made in this letter. The first thing is that, as was mentioned before, it would create a dangerous precedent to legislate on the type and object of research when we have mechanisms that have been set up by Parliament to do this on behalf of th

Health committee  I think I've already responded to that. I believe we are doing the right thing. We're doing it as fast as we possibly can, and I realize that research is a slow process, and you know that as well as I do. We're doing that under the advice of experts in the field, from Canada, t

Health committee  Actually, that's a very good question. The way we're going to do this is by ensuring that all—and that's really rare for us—all the members of the scientific evaluation panel will be from outside Canada.

Health committee  Actually, I have. I've seen your letter and I've read the articles. In fact, I'd like to quote perhaps just one sentence from the latest one I've read, which was published in February 2012 in a reputable peer-reviewed journal, by Diaconu and colleagues: Beyond the limited pu

Health committee  It has been one of the problems, actually, because some of the people who really don't believe in the association of CCSVI have put forth exactly this observation: Why is it that so many patients have the same abnormalities in their vein system and don't show the MS symptoms? We