Last April at the Bloom Burton & Co. conference in Toronto, Nancy Harrison and Ali Tehrani of Amplitude Ventures pulled me aside for what they said was an important conversation. There’s something special going on in Vancouver's life sciences sector and you need to write about it, they said.
I had already noted many of Canada’s most prominent life sciences companies – like AbCellera, Xenon Pharmaceuticals Inc. , STEMCELL Technologies, Acuitas Therapeutics and Aspect Biosystems – were all based in Canada’s west coast capital and wondered what was behind that. I told them I was interested to know more, and they helped put me in touch with a slew of people representing a cross-section of the local sector.
That November I came to Vancouver and spent four marathon days meeting with founders, funders, academics, industry and government representatives and administrators including Wendy Hurlburt, Lana Janes, Ph.D., Carl Hansen, Pieter Cullis, Dermot Kelleher Tom Madden, Ali Ardakani Bill Hunter, Megan Levings, Jerel Davis, Peter Zandstra, Natalie Dakers, Fiona Dalton, Sriram Subramaniam and others. I interviewed about 50 people in total including BC innovation minister Brenda Bailey
I also saw some cool science too, including tiny brain “organoids” grown in petri dishes at Stemcell, a giant electron microscope at the service of Dr. Subramaniam on the The University of British Columbia campus, a production facility at Clarius Mobile Health that manufactured handheld, wireless ultrasound readers and a 3D printing machine at Aspect that made synthetic, transplantable tissue. I concluded that Nancy and Ali were right.
Sharing with you here the cover story that came out of this. It's about what has made Vancouver this country's most exciting and advanced biotech capital, and how leading players are determined to transform the city – and by turn Canada – into a haven for homegrown pharma giants. It’s about time; we’ve never had one.
Canadians discovered insulin a century ago and we’ve made many breakthrough discoveries since, but that science ultimately gets commercialized elsewhere, creating major economic spinoff benefits outside Canada. At a time when Canada's woeful productivity performance is under heightened scrutiny, it’s noteworthy to see an innovative local sector’s players working with such determination and unity. If they succeed – and there is a long way to go – in putting together the missing pieces for a full-stack ecosystem, perhaps they can build a thriving, vertically integrated industry that would bring jobs & prosperity to the region. They are following a roadmap that should serve as a guide to others across Canada. But it’s early days. And Vancouver has been here before; things didn't end well the 1st time.
Gordon McCauley (He/Him) adMare BioInnovations, Abdera Therapeutics Francois Benard Angus Livingstone BC Children's Hospital, Vancouver Martha Piper Karimah Es Sabar Andrew Booth Chrystia Freeland François-Philippe Champagne
