Health committee  It would be nice if IRAP were peer reviewed.

Health committee  Oh, great. Thanks. To me, the most important thing would be to break down the barriers between disciplines and encourage a multidisciplinary approach. I think that is crucial to product development. I don't know how to do that, but if I could wave my magic wand that you have bestowed upon me and have this occur, I would put multidisciplinary encouragement first.

Health committee  As I mentioned, I would like one of the granting councils to claim them as their own and to put in place a number of studentships, or scholarships, or post-doctoral fellowships to do this. I also think that it would be very nice if we set up post-doctoral fellowships in industry, so that people who come out of our university system could work in a pharmaceutical company for a while, and get exposed to that sort of approach and then bring it back.

Health committee  I'll let you take that one.

Health committee  Certainly we need more capital from venture capitalists, and we need them to be willing to take risks, and to be more knowledgeable in assessing the material that is presented to them. How best to go about that, I'm not really sure. What tends to motivate venture capitalists is making money in the long term.

Health committee  Yes, that's the phase three human trial.

Health committee  Yes, we did. We did an IPO. This was in 1995. We did an IPO, and we traded on the TSX and the NASDAQ. Right now, as an exit strategy for biotechs, no one is doing an IPO anymore. You just hope to be bought up by a bigger company.

Health committee  I would fully agree with that. We didn't say we wanted more money. We said that it would be nice if we could better focus it such that the work being done is converted to products. Strategies would be a good start. I'm not asking to pour more money into the existing system, just to use the existing money differently.

Health committee  What I mentioned was that we have a shortage of medicinal chemists. A medicinal chemist is a chemist who makes molecules. All drugs are molecules, but not all molecules are drugs, and it takes people with a subset of interests to be able to identify those. As mentioned, we actually do have a shortage of medicinal chemists, people who want to make drug molecules in this country.

Health committee  The countries that exceeded were the United States, Japan, Germany, and Switzerland. They were the main ones that exceeded. These are countries which have a strong industrial pharmaceutical sector that can take discoveries and convert them to products. So, yes, there were a number of countries that substantially exceeded their predictions.

Health committee  I'll answer it in two ways. First of all, they have particular programs in place that fund medicinal chemistry, which actually fund drug discovery. It's not tacked on to some other particular funding agency. As already mentioned, for example, in the United States they have SBIR, so they have particular programs that are probably better at encouraging this sort of translation.

Health committee  MaRS is an interesting idea and there are many aspects of MaRS that I like. Other times I think it's from Venus. Within MaRS, we have the example of the university hospitals at the University of Toronto also working with the university. I always liked that. University hospitals, of course, can have their own research institutes and their own research efforts, which could be distinct and different from the universities with which they're associated.

Health committee  Yes.

Health committee  That's a dangerous thing. I would hate to think that the research budget has x number of dollars in it, and so to solve the problem we're going to take all the money from the basic science people and whip it over to the applied people. The end result is that we'll just gut basic science, and we've already said that basic science is particularly strong.

Health committee  Sure. Since I interact with the pharmaceutical industry a lot, I get to see it. The pharmaceutical industry will have biologists, chemists, and biochemists in the same building. When you, as a biologist, have a problem that needs a chemist's answer, you go down the hall and speak to them.