Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. It is with great pleasure that I appear before you today in my role at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to discuss the important issue of multiple sclerosis research in Canada. Your committee is holding important hearings on the matter, and I'm

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  You have several questions. I think I will start by thanking you for making it clear that you believe that any treatment should be based on evidence and for having the confidence that CIHR can provide that evidence. Now obviously we can only fund proposals that are submitted to

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  That's another piece to we're trying to do to accelerate the research in that area. For accelerating research in that area, we have to see the whole picture and put this proposal in the broader context of the relationships between cerebrospinal venous insufficiency and venous con

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  Not necessarily with experience in treating patients with MS, but with experience in angioplasty, yes. So we need people with experience in imaging for diagnosing venous insufficiency, neurologists with experience with MS, and, of course, surgeons with experience with angioplasty

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  Well, that's exactly...it's part of what we're asking this committee of experts: to analyze what's out there and what are the contradistinctions. As you saw, there are contradictions out there in the literature. We have to understand these contradictions, look at what's out there

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  So again, I think we agree here that our health care system is based on evidence-based practice. We do not submit patients to treatments for which we don't have proof that it works and that the benefits outweigh the risks. That's the first thing. The second thing is what you're

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  Well, as I said already, and I'm sorry that I'm repeating myself, we're really anxious to receive a proposal for a randomized clinical trial, with treatment, to look at the possibility of funding a study, if it's deemed scientifically acceptable and methodologically sound, to loo

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  There would be a treatment arm.

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  Out of that $16 million, which, as you know, was money provided to us by the federal government as an increase over our base budget to address a number of priorities, one of these priorities was to increase the funding for clinical trials. That's exactly what we're talking about

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  If you're asking whether the $16 million will be entirely devoted to MS research, the answer is no.

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  What I'm telling you is that we haven't yet received formal approval from Treasury Board as to how we're going to spend this money, so I cannot give you exact figures. But we have asked for a significant portion of that money to be put in our open grants competition so we can fun

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  We always make sure that every aspect of an application has an expert reviewer to look at it. If the application looks like what I think it will look like, there will be vascular aspects, so we'll have an expert in vascular surgery involved. We need them. We'll also have an exper

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  Mr. Malo, you are putting a balloon into a blood vessel, a vein with a weak wall, and enlarging that vein. Is the procedure 100% safe? I know of no procedure, even eating natural food, that is 100% safe. The question we must ask ourselves with any procedure is whether the benefi

Health committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. Members of the committee, as president of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research it's a privilege for me to offer you a report card on the supplementary estimates (B) and use this opportunity to discuss how CIHR has employed its budgetary allocation t

Health committee  It's certainly affected by discoveries made in other countries, but I think what we're trying to achieve with the patient-oriented research strategy is to take full benefit of the discoveries that are made in this country and ensure they do impact the health of Canadians. We have