Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  I think the therapies are those we mentioned. I have to say that if you do not regard the geographic issue, which I'm not playing down—it's a very serious one—our clinicians are actually completely in tune with international groups. I don't think we would be concerned any more th

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  It really is the shepherding of a promising compound straight through all the different steps needed to bring it to a clinical trial.

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  On a second alternative, I heard somebody from England speak a couple of months ago. They have the same concern we have about the gap between what you find from research and moving it along to a treatment that's accessible to patients. What they may be doing in the U.K. is a diff

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  That's right. This is Dr. Jean-Pierre Julien's work. In fact, the idea for what he's doing is based on something that was tried for Alzheimer's disease, which was to try to immunize individuals against a protein or a fragment of a protein, which triggers an inflammatory response.

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  I don't know when this is going to be ready to be moved to clinical trial, but they're going step by step, because the problem is that you worry about creating an anti-immune reaction against something that you start with to be helpful. What they're worried about is curing one th

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  Our ask in terms of research funding has been to follow the recommendations of the Kirby report and bring the CIHR funding level to be 1% of health spending in Canada. That's the financial wish.

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  I can think of two things. One is what Alex was referring to, which exists in the U.S. for the sort of nurturing of compounds from the lab to clinical trials. I've heard someone speak on this. There are actual pathways where you sort of shepherd a compound through. The amount of

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  I think it's approximately the amount of money they talk about for the entire process. That's going from a university laboratory up to a biotech company. You need to have a lot of pre-clinical trials, safety, and clearance in the United States with the FDA. It has its own agenda

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  I think you may be referring to the immunization study.

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  Our clinical trials network is running a trial on ceftriaxone, and a few of the centres are running a second trial. Some of our clinicians work as part of American groups also, so there's an advantage there. We could carry out more trials, because there are things on the launch p

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  There are drugs that act on different mechanisms. One of them is supposedly going to act on intercellular protein aggregates, which has something in common with a number of neurodegenerative disorders. So it's a compound that works on that. That's from a small biotech company. Th

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  Yes. ALS is unfortunately not an attractive candidate to large pharmaceutical companies because the number of individuals with ALS is rather small. Technically speaking, by the international definition, ALS is considered to be a rare disease. So a biotech company looks for a comp

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  I would like to say two things. First of all, it must be stated that neurological diseases share some points in common. Every researcher goes about his or her work, but constantly follows the evolution of the research work being done on other diseases such as Huntington's, Parki

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  All right. In fact, I am almost finished.

Subcommittee on Neurological Disease committee  I just wanted to say that ALS Canada cannot continue to support clinical trials. The support of clinical trials is undoubtedly an arena of national concern, not one that can be undertaken by provincial health systems. Thank you very much for your attention.