Legislation unveiled last month repealing the four-decades-old Medical Research Council (MRC) and establishing a virtual Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) network will transform Canada's biomedical and healthcare research community if approved by Parliament this 1 April ( Nature Med. 4, 989; 1998).

The CIHR will be much larger and complex in scope than the MRC and is now taking shape under the guidance of MRC president Henry Friesen, who has been appointed chair of the interim CIHR governing council. A 22 November discussion paper on the network, now undergoing public scrutiny, envisions 10–15 virtual institutes. Each will “likely focus upon different diseases and fundamental processes, something like the [extramural program of the US National Institutes of Health], and investigators will submit their grant applications to the most relevant institute,” explains Peter Wells of the University of Toronto.

The changing biomedical landscape has troubled some. “Since the institutes will have a significant role in facilitating the development of new research fields, as distinct from investigator-initiated research, there is concern that progress in existing fields not represented by an institute may be disadvantaged,” says Wells. “It remains to be seen how the support of novel and high-risk approaches rather than diseases or health processes will fare in the CIHR, although the stated intent is to fund all areas equitably.”

But many more in the Canadian research community welcome the new era in Canadian research. Francis Vaccarino, co-chair of the Knowledge Management subcommittee of the CIHR interim governing council, insists, “Health research will be more integrative, collaborative, better-coordinated and better-funded.”

More than CAN$500 million (US$338 million) will drive the CIHR start-up through FY01–02 and the transfer of “health-related research” to the CIHR from Canada's other science agencies, such as the MRC and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council. The funding is not only “more money, but money that's more intelligently spent,” claims federal health minister Allan Rock.