Science and Research

Opening remarks

Good afternoon, Madam Chair and honourable members of the standing committee. My name's Kevin Outterson. I'm the Austin B. Fletcher professor of law at Boston University and the founding executive director of CARB-X, which is the world's largest non-profit partnership supporting the development of treatments, vaccines and diagnostics to combat AMR. CARB-X is proud of the fact that Canada has supported CARB-X since 2023. I'm going to focus my remarks today on point four—Canada's role in financing innovation, a complementary mix of push and pull incentives to support new antibiotics—but I have to say that the first two witnesses were excellent, and I support what they said as well. For more than a decade, reports from around the world, including the review on AMR from the United Kingdom, official communiqués of the G7 and the G20, and, most recently, reports from Global AMR R&D Hub—of which Canada is a board member—have all emphasized the importance of combining both push and pull incentives to accelerate innovation and fix that broken market for antibiotics. In most therapeutic areas, like cancer or something, the best new drugs are rapidly and widely used by doctors and…

Opening remarks

Thank you. I want to thank the Standing Committee on Science and Research for inviting me to testify today. My name is Henry Skinner. I'm a microbiologist, a life science investor and the CEO of the AMR Action Fund. The AMR Action Fund is the world's largest venture capital fund solely dedicated to late-stage antimicrobial research and development. It was created in 2020 through a collaboration between the pharmaceutical industry and philanthropic organizations like the Wellcome Trust, which recognized that AMR is a fast-moving threat that imperils the health of everyone and could cost the global economy trillions of dollars. My fund is trying to mitigate this threat and protect patients by investing in small and mid-sized companies that are developing urgently needed therapeutics for the most dangerous drug-resistant bacteria and fungi, which the WHO and the CDC call “priority pathogens”. I have been investing in biotechnology companies for 25 years, and the decline in investment and innovation in the field of antibiotics is alarming. Like most venture capital funds, we are structured to exist for approximately 10 years, which we hope is enough time for policy-makers around…

Opening remarks

Good afternoon, Madam Chair. I'd like to thank the committee for the opportunity to testify and share my perspective. My name is Joe Rubin. I'm a veterinarian and microbiologist and a professor in the Department of Veterinary Microbiology at the University of Saskatchewan. I've been working on antimicrobial resistance, primarily in companion animals and food products, for nearly 20 years. My current roles are as an educator of veterinary students in the areas of bacteriology and infectious diseases and as a researcher, where I study the problem of AMR from a number of perspectives. There are three areas I would like to highlight today where I can see a need for additional support: first, research into evidence-based antimicrobial stewardship for companion animals; second, support for global collaborations to tackle resistance in low- and middle-income countries; and third, support to harmonize diagnostic testing in veterinary labs, with the goal of improving both passive surveillance and antimicrobial stewardship. With respect to the first topic, the committee has heard testimony about the importance of stewardship to improve how and when antimicrobials are used, so that we can…

Opening remarks

Good evening, Madam Chair and members of the science and research committee. I would like to thank you for the opportunity to testify to you today. My name is Dao Nguyen. I speak to you as a physician working at McGill University's teaching hospital as a professor of medicine and microbiology, as a researcher who studies difficult-to-treat bacterial infections and, last, as the founding director of the McGill AMR Centre and a new AMR Quebec network, where I lead the efforts to structure and mobilize a diverse ecosystem of over 150 academic researchers at McGill University and across Quebec with government, public and private partners across the human, animal and environmental health sectors. First, I would like to paint a brief picture of what AMR looks like through the lens of a physician. I would like you to imagine that a loved one is diagnosed with cancer, which is curable but requires chemotherapy. During chemotherapy, which significantly weakens one's immune system, you develop a fever, a typical sign of infection. For this, you are immediately prescribed antibiotics, for which I might do a test to figure out what kind of infection you have. If the infection is caused by…

Opening remarks

That's an excellent question. It's difficult to answer it because we don't import a huge number of products yet. We'd need to compare the different products to find out which resistance genes they contain. This would need to be done prospectively. We don't have enough data to answer this question yet.