Alain Beaudet

CIHR at 10: challenges met, challenges to come

By Dr Alain Beaudet

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) is celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2010. Ten years may seem long, but it is actually a very short time particularly for an organization with such an ambitious mandate, working in areas where outcomes tend to be long-term.

The creation of CIHR from its predecessor, the Medical Research Council (MRC), was much more than a name change. MRC gave us a solid foundation in biomedical research. But CIHR encompasses more disciplines, more research fields and more methodologies than did MRC. As a result of CIHR's expanded mandate, we have witnessed major funding increases in population health and health services research — areas critical to understanding and addressing the broad determinants of health.

Our mandate not only calls for knowledge creation in these expanded areas, but requires that we focus on knowledge translation — ensuring that the research we support contributes to improving the health of Canadians, the strength of our health-care system and growth in the Canadian economy.

The CIHR mandate also requires that we set strategic priorities for research. Our close relationships with our stakeholders and partners in the health charities, provinces and private sector mean that CIHR's strategic research agenda is really the entire health research community's agenda. The maximization of our collective efforts is translating into both immediate and long-term bene-fits for Canadians.

Successful translation downstream requires efficient fueling of the innovation pipeline upstream. This is why CIHR has kept investing heavily in basic biomedical research. In fact, the biomedical sector is the one that has benefited the most by far from the threefold increase in CIHR's base budget over the past 10 years. Not surprisingly, bibliometric indices show that Canada ranks among the top performing countries in terms of impact of basic biomedical publications and a world leader in fields such as stem cells and the neurosciences.

CIHR has been equally successful at launching original programs aimed at maximizing uptake and impact of research results. Its Partnerships for Health Systems Improvement (PHSI) program, which funds teams to conduct applied and policy-relevant health services and systems research. Lots of researchers look at these questions. The difference with PHSI is that the teams are made up of both researchers and decision makers. This means that the questions asked are the right ones and the answers are more likely to be taken up in health policies and programs. Evidence on Tap brings together "dream teams" of experts on current health research issues to provide provincial and territorial policy makers evidence for making responsive, effective health policy.

CIHR-funded research is having an impact beyond Canada's borders. For instance, Dr Geoffrey Fong of the University of Waterloo is leading the International Tobacco Control Evaluation Project, an international collaboration that has become the world's authority on the effectiveness of tobacco control policies. Countries including Ireland, France, Malaysia, the United Kingdom and China have used its findings to shape their tobacco control policies.

translating knowledge

CIHR is also focusing on commercialization as an important part of knowledge translation. Canada is in short supply of people with the right blend of business and science skills necessary to commercialize health discoveries. The Science to Business program, which helps business schools recruit talented PhD graduates into health-oriented MBAs, is helping to close that gap. CIHR's Proof of Principle (PoP) program provides targeted funding for research that is promising but needs more polishing to be of interest to private-section and venture-capital partners. Amorfix Life Sciences Ltd, which has designed and commercialized a new blood test to detect Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) (the human variety of mad cow disease) has its origins in PoP funding. A major blood transfusion clinic in France recently used the Amorfix test to screen 10,000 blood samples for vCJD.

These successes are being applied every day to improve the health of Canadians and strengthen our health-care system.

As we celebrate our 10th anniversary, we are preparing to move forward as an organization. Last year, we released our Health Research Roadmap: Creating innovative research for better health and health care, CIHR's five-year strategic plan. It outlines four strategic directions: invest in world-class research excellence; address health and health-system research priorities; accelerate the capture of health and economic benefits of health research; and, achieve organizational excellence, foster ethics and demonstrate impact.

We are also embarking on our second international review. This review, led by Dr Elias Zerhouni, former director of the National Institutes of Health in the US, will focus on two questions: has CIHR been effective in fulfilling its mandate as outlined in the CIHR Act? And how can CIHR improve at achieving its mandate?

Certainly CIHR's first 10 years were filled with challenges and achievements. There is every reason to believe that the next 10 years will be equally challenging and equally rewarding. There appears to be a new mood among Canadians regarding science and technology, a new understanding of its importance to Canada's continued prosperity. The attention paid to the recent announcement of the Canada Excellence Research Chairs and their importance for Canada as we begin to climb out of the recent economic downturn is evidence of this changed attitude.

Our health-care system continues to struggle with the challenge of containing rising costs while continuing to provide timely care to Canadians wherever they need it. CIHR has initiated consultations to create a shared vision for a new Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research to close the gap between basic discoveries and their application. The result will be better health for Canadians and, equally important, economic and sustainability benefits for Canada's health-care system.

As well, 2014 will see the expiration of the federal/provincial/territorial 10-year plan to strengthen health care. As a new health accord is negotiated, it will be critical to ensure that research figures prominently in whatever plan is devised.

Through CIHR, the Canadian health research community will continue to play its role in helping Canada meet those challenges, for the benefit of all Canadians.

Alain Beaudet, MD, PhD, is President of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.