Finance committee  Yes, absolutely. The Canadian government has taken great steps to be able to increase local production of things like masks, gowns and so on. Understandably, that's being done because there is some variety of market failure. I think the important thing to recognize and certainly

Health committee  Yes, absolutely. I briefly mentioned our experience with sleeping sickness, or DNDi's experience with sleeping sickness. Sleeping sickness is one of these diseases that was horribly neglected for years. The treatment that was available 13 years ago was effectively to dissolve an

Health committee  I think it really comes back to this idea that we need to get the policies correct at the federal level. The reality is that Canada contributes immensely to global health, to health research and to our understanding of population and public health. Our health researchers are pr

Health committee  Well, that really depends on the kind of product we're talking about. On Tuesday we heard from a witness who said that as we move toward more precision medicine, everything will become a rare disease, right? Every version of diabetes, all the different genetic variations, and so

Health committee  I'm not a contract lawyer—I'm a clinician—but I think you insert some sort of clause that says these are the conditions under which the licence is being issued. My colleagues from UAEM have put more thought into the particularities of this than I have.

Health committee  This is, effectively, the experience that we've had with the drugs for neglected diseases initiative. DNDi is, effectively, a virtual not-for-profit pharmaceutical company. It coordinates. It runs randomized controlled trials under very difficult field circumstances. If you think

Health committee  Yes, you're absolutely right. Right now, the pathway is effectively a licensing agreement. Someone discovers something, and then it's handed over through an exclusive licence. I'm simplifying things significantly here, but let's just work with that. From that point on, things are

Health committee  I can comment. The intention of a patent is to grant market exclusivity. As it was designed, it's supposed to be a reward for innovation. The intention behind it is to prevent competition. In our experience, the ways in which we have been able to access lower-cost medicines is th

Health committee  This ties into the broader question of innovation, right? We're talking about creating a Canada that innovates and is a leader in science and technology. That requires us—or government—to identify priorities that meet public health needs. You're right: it's about choosing a few

Health committee  I agree completely with you. Really, this is about this idea of partnerships and multiple stakeholders. In order to set priorities, I think we need to be looking at what capacities we have and what kind of expertise we have domestically in different research and therapeutic areas

Health committee  As an organization that works predominantly in crisis-affected countries, generally in low- and middle-income countries, our experience in trying to access affordable medicines is that the way in which we get the price of these things down is through competition. This is really w

Health committee  I don't believe that Canada contributed to bedaquiline. There were public funds, but I don't believe they were Canadian, to my knowledge. Canada certainly contributes to the development of other treatments, such as early-stage research and so on.

Health committee  To add to that, we have a major problem with tuberculosis drug development. We are quite simply running out of viable options, and this is a global problem. The Canadian tuberculosis standards reflect global treatment options that are available to everyone, and the options are qu

Health committee  I think we need the framework. That's what doesn't really exist, this partnership model to develop products. I think we have good push funding. CIHR and other funding agencies as well are granting agencies. You apply, and it's a competitive process. They evaluate the merits of yo

Health committee  I don't know the specifics of these funding proposals, but on this basic concept of bringing all of these actors together to work to solve a common problem, yes, but with the caveat that we need to think through the framework from start to finish, all of the steps that need to be