Question Period Note: CANADIAN INSTITUTES OF HEALTH RESEARCH SUPPORT FOR COVID-19 RESEARCH

• Canadians and people around the world are expecting the international research community to continue to develop and rollout safe vaccines and therapies to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and return to a more normal life.

• Research is central to our domestic and international efforts to address COVID-19 and the Canadian research community has risen to the challenge at an unprecedented pace.
• Through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), our government has been working hand in hand with domestic and international partners to find solutions to this pandemic.
• Budget 2022 proposes to provide $20 million over five years, starting in 2022-23, for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to support additional research on the long-term effects of COVID-19 infections on Canadians, as well as the wider impacts of COVID-19 on health and health care systems.
• I have confidence that these initiatives led by CIHR will contribute to the evidence we need to help Canada address this public health crisis.

IF PRESSED ON DETAILS OF THESE INVESTMENTS…
• Since March 2020, CIHR has moved quickly, working with partners, to invest nearly $330 million in more than 800 research projects, which focus not only on vaccines, but also on other therapeutics, testing, and transmission dynamics, and other COVID-19 related priority areas as they emerged.
• This includes support for the creation of new research evidence to address the substance use and mental health needs of Canadians during these difficult times.
• Enabled by this investment, CIHR and partners across Canada collaborated to inform the implementation of promising interventions and policies designed to improve pandemic preparedness within long-term care facilities.
• I am also pleased to say that CIHR’s investments towards COVID-19 research have committed to supporting research that addresses the impact of the pandemic on the well-being of Indigenous Peoples, enhancing Indigenous community-led research and knowledge mobilization
• Further, these investments support research that will increase our understanding of persistent and emerging gaps and priority areas – including variants of concern and Long-COVID – that continue to provide decision makers with rapid evidence from which guidance can be developed and evaluated.

OVID-19 Rapid Research Response at a glance:
Canada’s research community is contributing to both the global and domestic response to COVID-19 and is well-poised for significant discoveries.

The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), as Canada’s health research funding agency, has moved at an unprecedented pace to mobilize the research community and deliver programs while maintaining rigour in funding the most outstanding research.

CIHR and its federal and provincial partners accelerated their timelines to invest $55.3M that translated into 100 research grants from the initial COVID-19 Rapid Research Response competition in March 2020. This included support for research into vaccines, diagnostics, transmission dynamics, therapeutics and clinical management, and research into coordination, governance, and logistics; public health response and its impact; social dynamics, communications, and trust; and transmission dynamics.

In April 2020, CIHR received an additional $114.9M in funding for additional countermeasures against COVID-19, which:
• enabled researchers to accelerate the development, testing and implementation of medical and social countermeasures to mitigate the rapid spread of COVID-19 and its negative consequences on people, communities, and health systems;
• supported CIHR’s COVID-19 and Mental Health Initiative;
• secured Canadian participation in domestic and international clinical trials to increase the understanding of the efficacy and effectiveness of vaccines, therapeutics, mental health supports and clinical management approaches to COVID-19.

CIHR’s COVID-19 Rapid Response funding opportunities also enabled partnerships between industry leaders (e.g. Medicago, Inovio), and Canadian researchers.

Additionally, CIHR – in partnership with PHAC - funds the Canadian Immunization Research Network (CIRN), a national network that undertakes coordinated, collaborative, and multi-disciplinary vaccine and immunization-related research. This includes examining various biomedical research questions and aspects of the vaccine life cycle including safety, short- and long-term effectiveness and protection, as well as social issues like hesitancy and uptake.

CIHR has also invested in research to better understand and address the impacts of the pandemic on the opioid crisis in Canada. With a $1M investment from CIHR, CRISM (a CIHR funded network) produced national guidance documents to enable the development and dissemination of national guidelines related to prescribing, dispensing, and delivery of opioids and other narcotics during the COVID-19 pandemic to support people who use drugs.

CIHR also invested $2.2 million to fund the Operating Grant for the Evaluation of Harm Reductions Approaches to Address the Opioid Crisis in the Context of COVID-19. This investment is funding five research grants that would address harm reduction approaches to the opioid crisis and to better understand its compounding intersection with the COVID-19 pandemic.

To inform the next steps of the COVID-19 response in long-term care, CIHR and partners have invested $3.4M to support evidence-informed implementation and sustainability of promising practice interventions and policies designed to improve pandemic preparedness within long-term care, in collaboration with Healthcare Excellence Canada.

CIHR launched two Indigenous COVID-19 Rapid Research Funding Opportunities, with a total investment of approximately $8 million, to support:
• bold, innovative, Indigenous community-led, strengths-based, solutions-focused research projects that focus on a wide range of topics and use diverse methods, forming a strong base to study and understand the experiences of First Nations, Inuit, Métis, and Urban Indigenous communities throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
• enable rapid and timely distinctions-based, and Indigenous community-led research and knowledge mobilization that is responsive to the unique circumstances and the current phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in First Nations, Inuit, Métis and Urban Indigenous communities in Canada.

Building on the priorities from CIHR’s COVID-19 investments, CIHR launched several additional rapid response competitions to support emerging priorities. This includes investments:
• to support collaboration and rapid response to the need for synthesized Canadian knowledge and evidence across the full breadth of Canada’s COVID-19 pandemic response (including public-health measures, clinical management, health-system arrangements, and economic and social impacts).
• to expand existing national and international clinical trial networks to coordinate research on interventions to prevent, detect, manage, and/or treat COVID-19.
• to accelerate research and lead the formation of a variant network to coordinate and align efforts in this field.
• in a Canadian Network for Emerging Variants Research to enable the rapid support of research activities required to swiftly characterize and assess the individual and population health threats of emerging variants of concern.
• to address persistent evidence gaps such as variants of the virus, vaccine development and uptake, testing, mental health, and the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic is having specific impacts on women, racialized populations, and Métis, Inuit and First Nations Peoples.

CIHR also worked with partners to fund research on vaccine confidence to improve public understanding of vaccines and help Canadians to make evidence-based decisions, especially among populations that are hesitant about vaccines, and to help improve vaccine uptake among populations experiencing systemic inequities, conditions of marginalization, Indigenous (First Nations, Inuit, Métis and/or Urban Indigenous) communities and/or among populations who are historically under-vaccinated.

CIHR also invested in 70 projects to improve our understanding of, response to, and recovery from the co-occurring stressful and traumatic events that stem from the current COVID-19 pandemic, and/or restricted conditions associated with public health measures in Canada in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with respect to children, youth and families in Canada.

CIHR is also investing in a series of rolling competitions designed in an iterative way in consultation with partners. These investments are targeting key emerging research priorities and gaps to contribute to Canada’s ongoing response to the pandemic in a flexible and rapid way. The first competition was launched on March 3, 2021 and funded 69 projects for a total of $26.3 million the second competition was launched on July 27, 2021. The total funding amount available for these competitions is approximately $119M.

Further, the Government of Canada, under the leadership of CIHR, is establishing a Centre for Research on Pandemic Preparedness and Health Emergencies. The Research Centre will allow CIHR to support real-time knowledge translation and knowledge mobilization for use by the research community and decision-makers alike, as well as to invest $18.5 million per year to build capacity, fund research into emergent priorities in pandemic preparedness, and implement the Budget 2022 investment of $20M over 5 years to study the long-term impacts of COVID-19.

KEY FACTS
• As of January 2022, CIHR has invested nearly $330 million, with another $20M from partners, on 818 research projects through 31 competitions on COVID-19 research.
• Funds were provided through competitions such as the initial Rapid Research response (e.g. testing and vaccines), the COVID & Mental Health Initiative, knowledge syntheses, and emerging research gaps and priorities, and more recently expanding towards long-term health impacts.